subject of
investigation can be more elusive. The mind that could grapple with
this and arrive at the secrets and laws of the subtle medium through
which the human eye receives impression is indeed worthy of our
veneration. Probably, excepting Humboldt, no German scientist in these
later centuries has reached such eminence. The fields of the two
men were widely different. The one we know best as the scientific
traveller, roaming the earth over, and reducing to ordered knowledge
what can be perceived of its fauna and flora, of the strata that
underlie it, the oceans that toss upon it, the atmosphere that
surrounds it. The other roved not widely, but keeping to his lenses
and calculations, penetrated perhaps more profoundly. Helmholtz, a
well-born youth, began his career as a surgeon in the Prussian army,
and his service there, no doubt, contributed to the manly carriage
for which he was conspicuous. He married a lady of a noble house of
Wuertemberg, and moved in an environment conducive to courtly manners.
Heidelberg, like the German universities in general well understood
that ability in its teachers, and not a pompous architectural
display, makes a great institution. Its buildings were scattered and
unpretending. Helmholtz had a lecture-room and laboratory apart, in
a structure modern and graceful, but modest in its appeal. Here he
discoursed to reverent throngs in tones never loud or confident. It is
for wiseacres and charlatans to declaim and domineer. The masters
are deferential in the presence of the sublimities and of the
intelligences they are striving to enlighten.

In Germany I saw the great lights of science from afar, coming into
relations of intimacy only with one or two _privat-docents_,
young men struggling precariously for a foothold. One such striver I
came to know well, a young man gifted but physically crippled, who,
being anxious to get up his English, as I was to get up my German,
entered with me into an arrangement to converse in these alternately.
We were about on a par in our knowledge or ignorance of the speech not
native to us, and helped each other merrily out of the pitfalls into
which we stumbled, according as English or German ruled the time.

I was aghast to find that I had been telling my new German
acquaintances that while a married man, I had _deserted_ and
_cast off_ my wife and little boy in America, when I meant to
say only that I had left them behind during my temporary sojourn. A