sity men of Germany to foregather of nights in the genial
pursuit of drinking beer, and many of the notable theories which
German scholarship has propounded are to be directly attributed to
this stimulating good fellowship known as kommers. Indeed, when one
has imbibed twelve or fourteen steins of beer and sat in an atmosphere
of tobacco smoke for some hours, his mind attains a clarity, a sense
of proportion, a power of reflection, speculation, and intuition which
enables him to evolve those notable theories for which German
scholarship is so famous. It is under the intellectual stimulus of the
kommers, when the foam lies thick in the steins and blue clouds of
tobacco smoke roll overhead, that the great classical scholars of
Germany perceive that the classical epics, the Iliad, the Odyssey, the
Aeneid, are but the typifying of the rolling of the clouds in the
empyrean, the warfare of the foam-crested waves dashing upon the land,
that the metamorphoses and amours of the gods and all the myths of the
elder world, are but the mutations of the clouds and the fanciful
figures they take on and the metamorphoses and hurryings of the
ever-changing sea with its foam forms and the shadows that lie across
its unquiet surface. Wonderful indeed is the scientific imagination
that thus accounts for, classifies, and labels the imagination of the
poets, which otherwise we might think a thing defying classification,
an inspiration, a creative genius taking nothing from a dim suggestion
of the cold clouds and sea, but weaving its tales from the suggestion
of human lives and human passions. Wonderful indeed is the good sense
of the rest of the world in accepting unquestioned these important
discoveries of German scholars in the beer kellars, which well might
be called the laboratories of the classical department of the German
universities.

Dr. August Moehrlein was a staunch advocate of the advantage of the
kommers as an adjunct to every thoroughly organized university. If he
could not gather others for a kommers, he would hold a kommers all by
himself, or perchance with the barkeeper. Needless to say that the
name of Moehrlein was attached to many valuable and plausible theories
which America received as the last word on the subject treated;
needless to tell you that the various gods of India had been
identified with the sun, moon, and more important stars, and that it
was conclusively shown that the Sanskrit romancers had written their