Jump to content

Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 55.djvu/716

From Wikisource
This page has been validated.
696
POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

treatises. A lively social disposition bound him to numerous colleagues, and on the whole he felt so much at home in Grätz, especially after he had a new institute and a share in the direction of a zoölogical station at Trieste in prospect, that he had no thought of a change. He declined invitations to Marburg and Dorpat. He was always favored by the Government, and kept the marks of its consideration faithfully in memory."

Ludwig von Graff describes three plainly marked periods in Schmidt's scientific career. The first, the beginning of which coincided with his entrance into his scientific professorship, was characterized by his labors on the Turbellaria, from which he was only occasionally diverted during his residence at Jena and Cracow. "The observations on infusoria, radiates, and tapeworms, the structure of the annelids and the development of the mollusks, the descriptions of new amphibia, and the important discovery of the crustacean nature of the peltogasters, were, we might say, only rests in the uninterrupted course of the Turbellaria studies; and that Schmidt was constantly returning to them was not merely because particular interest had been devoted to them in Germany at that time only by M. Schultze and R. Leuckart, for other animal groups had fared no better among the then small number of scientifically working zoölogists, but Schmidt had won his earliest scientific fame with his little book on the fresh-water Rhabdocœlas (1848), and had by means of it entered the circle of recognized investigators. He gave in this book the first connected presentation of the whole organization of a group of animals, the diversity and great abundance of which in fresh water were hardly suspected, and the anatomy of which consisted of few and imperfectly understood isolated data; described new systems of organs in them, and based an improved classification on their remarkably complicated and variously graded structure, with new families, genera, and species. The little book was therefore received with much interest. A journey to the Faroe Islands in 1848, and his first excursion to Lesina in 1852, followed in 1856 by a journey from Cracow to Nice and Naples, enabled him to increase the number of new species, and permitted an insight into the great diversity of forms, without, however, giving him time for accurate anatomical investigations, for the nature of the objects promised a considerable advance in this direction only at the cost of tenacious patience and untiring industry. His subsequent labors on the Rhabdocœlas of the vicinity of Cracow, the Dendrocœlas of the vicinity of Grätz, and his researches on the Turbellaria of Corfu and Cephalonia, which (in 1861) closed this period of his career as worthily as it had begun, proved that Schmidt possessed both these requirements. These labors, if he had accomplished no more,