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 then in the possession of Sweden, and was born on December 9th, 1742. He had a fair education and at school was diligent and apt in acquiring knowledge. If he was born with a gift, if his genius was anything more than an immense capacity for taking pains, this aptness was the faculty which distinguished Scheele from other men. He made thousands of experiments and never forgot what he had learned from any one of them; he read such scientific books as he could get, and never needed to refer to them again. His friend Retsius, a pharmacist like himself as a young man, but subsequently Director of the Museum of Lund, has recorded Scheele's remarkable power in this respect. "When he was at Malmö," he writes (this was when Scheele was about twenty-four years of age), "he bought as many books as his small pay enabled him to procure. He would read these once or twice, and would then remember all that interested him, and never consulted them again."

An elder brother of Karl had been apprenticed to an apothecary at Gothenburg, but had died during his apprenticeship. Karl went to this apothecary, a Mr. Bauch, as apprentice at the age of fourteen, and remained there till Bauch sold his business in 1765. Then he went to another apothecary named Kjellström at Malmö. Three years later he was chief assistant to a Mr.