his countrymen in his views on this question. It is true that he was not entirely free from the influence of the old method of reasoning, as is shown by the fact that he tried to explain the burning of phosphorus in nitrogen—which of course occurred only because he did not in that day have instruments which made it possible to exhaust all the oxygen—by the assumption of a new and mysterious substance which was in itself the essence of light and heat.
He and Goethe worked together at the extraction of sugar from beets and at other enterprises, and Goethe was his regular and faithful student as well as his colleague and his patron. The great poet became an enthusiastic champion of the new chemistry, and published in Schiller's "Musenalmanach" in 1797, an epigram which ran:
Schon ein Irrlicht sah ich verschwinden, dich Phlogiston! Balde,
O Newtonisch Gespenst, folgst du dern Brüderchen nach.
(Will o' the Wisp, Phlogiston, I see thou hast vanished. And shortly
Newton's vague specter shall flee; flee as his brother has fled.)
But even Goethe's eloquent fulminations were not powerful enough to banish the Newtonian specter.
After Göttling's death Goethe continued to interest himself in the chemist's widow and little son. The latter, Karl Wilhelm Göttling, became librarian and professor of philology at Jena, and was later to repay in some measure his old patron's kindness to himself and his father, by assisting in preparing the complete edition of his works.
Dr. Alexander Nikolaus von Scherer, born in Russia in 1771, was recommended to Goethe in 1797 by Wilhelm von Humboldt. The poet furnished the newcomer a laboratory and equipment, and both he and Duke Karl August took the warmest interest in him. He made some interesting discoveries with phosphorus, and from 1798 he edited in Jena the Allgemeine Journal der Chemie. He died in Russia in 1824, a member of the St. Petersburg Academy.
One of Scherer's assistants in the conduct of the Journal was the somewhat younger Johann Wilhelm Ritter, a Silesian, who came to Jena penniless in 1795. He entered the university, and at once attracted general attention by his scientific aptitude. Ritter made some discoveries of great value. He discovered the chemically active dark rays in the solar spectrum, and accomplished some interesting results with galvanism. He obtained hydrogen and oxygen by disorganizing water with the electric current, he decomposed sulphate of copper, and he constructed a "charging pile" which was a precursor of the modern accumulator. Goethe studied and worked with him a great deal, especially during the years 1800 and 1801. He was inclined to be somewhat speculative and mystical, and especially after his call to the University of Munich in 1804, he gave himself up to various lines of fantastic theorizing. He became deeply interested in animal magnetism,
