Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/689

Rh governments, travelers, and scientists, from all parts of the globe, submitted specimens and problematic objects to the investigation or the verdict of the Berlin microscopist and savant. Deep-sea soundings, which began about this time, were especially fruitful in material for research; and the surprising result was brought to view that organic beings exist even at the greatest depth of the earth's submarine declivities, previously believed to be void of life.

Those who, in common with the writer, during Ehrenberg's most productive years, have witnessed and participated in the ardor and enthusiasm of the great and genial scholar and teacher, will ever remember with veneration the originality and conscientiousness of his methods of research, his wonderful skill, elegance, and acuteness in microscopical observation, and, above all, the lucid and graphic description of the master whose eyes undoubtedly had done more close and critical microscopical research than those of any contemporary. In him were fully and harmoniously blended the strictest sense of duty and truthfulness, the highest order of intellectual attainments, the exquisite taste of the accomplished classical scholar, and the charm of religious faith, genial disposition, and a generous heart.

Ehrenberg continued his work steadily and unfailingly to the end of his life, even when his eyesight had become impaired by protracted application, and when almost all of his famous contemporary co-laborers at the Berlin University had passed away.

In reviewing the discoveries, the works, and achievements of Ehrenberg, one is strongly impressed by their vast number and their high order in a domain at once so abstruse and so unlimited. In his hands, microscopical research first attained its proper application and a definite character, and revealed new fields of inquiry, afterward successfully trodden by others; his physiological and biological investigations paved the way for those discoveries which, in rapid succession, have been since effected in the structure and processes of the human body in health and disease, and which have shed much light upon the progress of every branch of the healing art. His researches and achievements contributed to every department of the physical sciences; the minute organic creation became, for the first time in our knowledge, a new link in the scale of animated beings, and its influence upon the formation of the strata of the earth's crust and their geological history was recognized. All the writings of Ehrenberg, the occasional orations and addresses delivered by him as Rector Magnificus of the University, as Permanent Secretary of the Berlin Academy of Sciences, etc, are masterpieces of learning, of exquisite style, replete with exalted ideas, and form enduring evidences of their illustrious author's eminence. His name will ever be honored as the father of modern microscopy.

How profoundly faith and rare modesty were congenial to his mind, will appear from the following brief passage from one of his latest rectoral orations; "Investigators and writers who, because at the limit of