Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 55.djvu/713

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SCAR SCHMIDT was characterized by Ludwig von Graff, his successor at Grätz, as a real naturalist who, keeping up with the advances of science and philosophy all his life, as a zoologist spanned the whole domain of that science, giving equal interest to every part and branch of it. The animal as a whole, as a living being in the series of organisms, was the object of his concern, and all the parts of the animal and all the processes that go on within it were alike interesting and important to him; and the ultimate purpose of his study of that object was to gain from the facts disclosed a philosophic view of Nature.

was born at Torgau, Prussia, February 24, 1823, the son of a military chaplain who was descended from an old family of clergymen—"a man of fine Saxon culture, with no very great taste for theology, and open-minded to a ripe old age," and who died in 1875. His mother was of French and German (Hamburg) descent, and counted the great Aristotelian Petrus Ramus among her ancestors. The father was a gentle instructor to the son; and the latter, attending in the intervals of study to duties of the household and the farm and making good use of his opportunities for relaxation, enjoyed a young life that was invigorating to mind and body. He thus acquired tastes that led him frequently in his later life to leave the city and his study and go into the country to build and plant, whereby he endeared himself to the Badenese farmers. On rainy days and winter evenings, as he gleefully told of himself in 1858, the boy of eleven or twelve years of age entertained himself and had his fancy stimulated by reading Campe's old accounts of his travels. He thus became interested in geography, and acquired a thirst for travel that was never quenched.

Having finished his elementary schooling at Weissenfels, on the Saale, where his grandfather had served as superintendent, he went in 1836 to the celebrated Royal School at Pforta, of which his father was an alumnus, and whither he himself took his son thirty years later. He was much impressed by the teaching of Koberstein, the historian of literature, who unlocked for him the world of Goethe and of romance; and he went out from Pforta into life with a full conviction that the soundness of our culture depends upon its humanistic foundation. He went to Halle in the fall of 1842 to fulfill his military obligations and study mathematics and natural science, and became interested in other branches. At the Berlin Hochschule, whither he went next, he further broadened