Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/129

Rh entered the laboratory of Liebig as a medical student. The system pursued there was a novel one in those days. The pupil was given a task to perform, and was left to himself to work out his own way and solve the problem as best he might. The next morning the students were called upon to describe what they had done and what they had discovered. A company of bright young men, who afterward became famous in science, was then collected around Liebig's tables, and Vogt formed strong friendships with some of them. During this period of study with Liebig the elder Vogt accepted a professorship in Bern, Switzerland, and removed thither.

Carl Vogt had completed his first memoir, on the Water of the Amnios at Different Periods of Fœtal Life (published in 1837), and was still thinking of no other career than that of chemistry, when he gave shelter to a law student who had been implicated in a plot against the Government, and kept him in his room till the search for him became dangerous. The student was sent away in one direction and Vogt sought refuge with his uncle Bose, forester to the Grand Duke at Jugenheim. The Grand Duke himself was enjoying a holiday on the estate with a prince of Prussia. Vogt borrowed a forester's uniform and engaged in the chase along with their Highnesses' huntsmen, while the police were searching for him everywhere except within the private domain of the sovereign. The princes returned to their courts, and Vogt, skillfully eluding the guards of the Rhine, escaped to Strasburg and thence to Bern.

Vogt interested himself in Strasburg in visiting the hospitals, where he found many political refugees, and in studying at the libraries and museums zoölogy and fossil forms till his father called him to Bern to assist him. With his natural taste for surgery went a sensitive nature which could not bear to witness the pain attendant upon operations in those days before anæsthetic and other humane appliances were introduced. He took up other branches and became a pupil of Prof. G. Valentin, author of the present physiological theory of the nerves and organs of the senses. He received his degree with honor at twenty-one years of age, and locked his diploma in a trunk which was deposited in the garret. He was proud, however, when his two completed memoirs on the Nerves of Reptiles won the praises of Karl Ernst von Bauer and of Humboldt. They were based upon a collection of American reptiles which Humboldt had left at Valentin's institute.

Louis Agassiz, a frequent visitor at Wilhelm Vogt's, wanted Carl in 1838 to assist him at Neufchâtel, but was introduced to Edouard Desor, then seeking employment, and took him. Carl followed a few months afterward. Agassiz, interested in the study of fresh-water fishes and living and fossil echinoderms, had fitted up