sense; I found myself in the most uncomfortable position in which
a boy could possibly be; languages and everything that is
acquired by their means, that gains praise and honor in the school,
were out of my reach; and when the venerable rector of the
gymnasium (Zimmermann), on one occasion of his examination of my
class, came to me and made a most cutting remonstrance with me
for my want of diligence, how I was the plague of my teachers
and the sorrow of my parents, and what did I think was to become
of me, and when I answered him that I would be a chemist, the
whole school and the good old man himself broke into an
uncontrollable fit of laughter, for no one at the time had any idea that
chemistry was a thing that could be studied.
Since the ordinary career of a gymnasium student was not open to me, my father took me to an apothecary at Heppenheim in the Hessian Bergstrasse; but at the end of ten months he was so tired of me that he sent me home again to my father. I wished to be a chemist, but not a druggist. The ten months sufficed to make me completely acquainted alike with the use and the manifold applications of the thousand and one different things which are found in a druggist's shop.
Left to myself in this way, without advice and direction, I completed my sixteenth year, and my persistent importunity at last induced my father to give me permission to go to the University of Bonn; whence I followed to Erlangen the Professor of Chemistry, Kastner, who had been called to the Bavarian University. There arose at that time at the newly established University of Bonn an extraordinary quickening of scientific life; but the degenerate philosophical methods of investigation, as they had been embodied in Oken, and still worse in Wilbrand, had a most pernicious influence on the branches of natural science, for it had led alike in lecture and in study to a want of appreciation of experiment and of an unprejudiced observation of Nature, which was ruinous to many talented young men.
From the professional chair the pupil received an abundance of ingenious contemplations; but, bodiless as they were, nothing could be made of them. The lectures of Kastner, who was considered a most eminent chemist, were without order, illogical, and arranged just like the jumble of knowledge which I carried about in my head. The relations which he discovered between phenomena were somewhat after the following pattern:
“The influence of the moon upon the rain is clear, for as soon as the moon is visible the thunderstorm ceases,” or “the influence of the sun's rays on water is shown by the rise of the water in the shafts of mines, some of which can not be worked in the height of summer.” That we see the moon when the thunderstorm is dispelled, and that the water rises in the mine when the brooks
