dations. So to
Marburg he went. Tyndall found lodgings in a little street called
"Heretics' Row." Possibly there be people who think that Tyndall's
taking a room in such a street was chance, too. Chance is natural law
not understood.

Marburg is a very lovely little town that clings amid a forest of trees
to the rocky hillside overlooking the River Lahn. Tyndall was very happy
at Marburg, and at times very miserable. The beauty of the place
appealed to him. He was a climber by nature, and the hills were a
continual temptation.

But the language was new; and before this his work had all been of a
practical kind. College seems small and trivial after you have been in
the actual world of affairs. But Tyndall did not give up. He rose every
morning at six, took his cold bath, dressed and ran up the hill half a
mile and back. He breakfasted with the family, that he might talk
German. Then he dived into differential calculus and philosophical
abstrusities. He was not sent to college: he went. And he made college
give up all it had. On the wall of his room, as a sort of ornamental
frieze in charcoal, he wrote this from Emerson: "High knowledge and
great strength are within the reach of every man who unflinchingly
enacts his best."

Down in the town was a bronze bust of a man who wrote for it the
following inscription: "This is the face of a man who has struggled
energetically."

One might almost imagine that Hawthorne had received from Tyndall the
hint which evolved itself into that fine story, "The Great Stone Face."

The bust just mentioned, attracted John Tyndall for another reason:
Carlyle had written of the man it symboled: "Reader, to thee, thyself,
even now, he has one counsel to give, the secret of his whole poetic
alchemy. Think of living! Thy life, wert thou the pitifullest of all the
sons of earth, is no idle dream, but a solemn reality. It is thine own;
it is all thou hast with which to front eternity. Work, then, even as he
has done--like a star, unhasting and unresting."

* * * * *

At Marburg, Tyndall was on good terms with the great Bunsen, and used to
act as his assistant in making practical chemical experiments before his
classes.

These amazing things done by chemists in public are seldom of much value
beyond giving a thrill to visitors who would otherwise drowse; it is
like humor in an oration: it opens up the mental pores.

Alexander Humboldt once attended a Bunsen