BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 
55 
Indeed she found so much to interest her in Berlin “with 
its colossal advantages that her stay of but a week, when 
months of residence was required, seemed “only an aggra¬ 
vation.” She did not have time even to present all her letters 
of introduction. Thus she refrained from seeking out the 
famous Virchow, or Koch, the great experimenter, and several 
others; but she consoled herself by remarking modestly, — 
“ Perhaps, too, an idea that I had no claim to intrude upon 
these men, helped to keep me away.” 
Under the impetus of her art enthusiasm, so rekindled in 
Berlin, she went, directly on her arrival at Dresden, on the 
16th of October, to the Gallery and to the room containing 
the Sistine Madonna, the effect of which she chronicles as 
overpowering. She immediately entered into an elaborate 
study of the colors, with the thought that a comparison of 
the predominant tones used by different painters would be 
interesting, and the suggestion “that the colors obtained by 
one master may be owing to certain impurities,” non-existent 
in other localities, with the possibility that “our chemically 
pure colors of to-day are perhaps the artist’s worst enemies.” 
She would have been glad to spend months of study over the 
collection of pictures, many of which were to her “dreams of 
beauty,” but she had only two days to spend in Dresden, “the 
charming old place of her childhood,” and there was much 
else for her to accomplish. One thing she did not neglect to do, 
and that was to visit her former music teacher, whom she 
found still unmarried, and living with her old mother and sister 
in rooms “filled with artistic souvenirs.” Before making any 
investigation of the chemical facilities of Dresden she visited 
the wonderful glass-works of the celebrated Blaschkas, and 
an extract from her account of them, well merits insertion 
here, — 
“The father (who formerly made glass eyes) had been in 
America many years ago. He spoke Polish, Bohemian, Italian, 
and German. They have recently begun to model flowers 
after nature. They are artistic productions and accurate, 
after life. It would be a stupendous addition as a botanical 
collection of flowers for a museum. It has occurred to me 
