BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 
59 
studies and about my chemical idea. He said if chemistry 
and morphology went hand in hand that it would be a great 
thing to have discovered it, and he seemed immensely pleased 
at the idea, saying that those who favored chemistry could 
employ this means for classification, etc.” 
Miss Abbott promised to send Drude various specimens 
of American plants, particularly the ocotilla and other Mex¬ 
ican flora which she had studied, and they parted on the 
friendliest terms. 
From Dresden she went to Leipsic. She presented to 
Professor Johannes Wislecenus a letter of introduction with 
which she had been provided by Professor Ladenburg. She 
found him “a large, tall man with silver-gray hair.” He re¬ 
ceived her at once in his study, and informed her that it 
would be impossible to offer her a place in his laboratory, as 
it was already very much crowded with men-students, and it 
was altogether against the rules to admit women. She was 
rather disgusted at the way in which he advised her to go to 
Zurich : “the way all women are shoved to Zurich,” seemed 
to her “like the last stage of investigation which only pushes 
the problem of life so far back without removing the veil.” 
He told her that it might be possible for her to attend the 
lectures, but that that “ depended entirely upon the wishes of 
each professor and the exercise of individual right.” However, 
he gave her a card of introduction to Dr. Ernest von Meyer, 
who he thought might be willing to take her into his private 
laboratory. Then without offering to show her his private 
laboratory, he turned her over to the tender mercies of an as¬ 
sistant who had general charge of his fifty students, to show 
her around the institution. Professor Wislecenus, when a 
young man, had been chemical assistant at Yale. She was 
impressed with “the great scale, on which the laboratories 
were run,” but she found comparatively few new or origi¬ 
nal pieces of apparatus; and her experience led her to the 
conclusion, that though the accommodation for the training 
of chemical graduates is immense, there was not much chance 
of obtaining the best education rapidly in these large univer¬ 
sities. She says: — 
