Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/680

 660 was imparted, existed nowhere at that time. What passed by that name were more like kitchens filled with all sorts of furnaces and utensils for the carrying out of metallurgical or pharmaceutical processes. No one really understood how to teach it. I afterward followed Kastner to Erlangen, where he had promised to analyze some minerals with me; but unfortunately he did not himself know how to do it, and he never carried out a single analysis with me.

The benefit which I gained through intercourse with other students during my sojourn in Bonn and Erlangen was the discovery of my ignorance in very many subjects which they brought with them from school to the university, and since I got nothing to do in chemistry I laid out all my energies to make up for my previously neglected school studies. In Bonn and Erlangen small numbers of students joined with me in a chemico-physical union, in which every member in turn had to read a paper on the question of the day, which, of course, consisted merely in a report on the subjects of the essays which appeared monthly in Gilbert and Schweigger's Journal.

In Erlangen, Schelling's lectures attracted me for a time, but Schelling possessed no thorough knowledge in the province of natural science, and the dressing up of natural phenomena with analogies and in images, which was called exposition, did not suit me. I returned to Darmstadt fully persuaded that I could not attain my ends in Germany.

The dissertations of Berzelius—that is to say, the better translation of his handbook, which had a large circulation at that time—were as springs in the desert. Mitscherlich, H. Rose, Wöhler, and Magnus had then repaired to Berzelius, in Stockholm; but Paris offered me means of instruction in many other branches of natural science, as, for instance, physics, such as could be found united in no other place. I made up my mind to go to Paris. I was then seventeen and a half years old. My journey to Paris, the way and manner in which I came in contact with Thenard, Humboldt, Dulong, and with Gay-Lussac, and how the boy found favor in the sight of those men, borders on the fabulous, and would be out of place here. Since then it has frequently been my experience that marked talent awakens in all men, I believe I may say without exception, an irrepressible desire to bring about its development. Each helps in his own way, and all together as if they were acting in concert; but talent only compels success if it is united with a firm, indomitable will. External hindrances to its development are in most cases very much less than those which lie in men themselves; for just as no one of the forces of Nature, however mighty it may be, ever produces an effect by itself alone, but always only in conjunction with other forces; so