Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 55.djvu/715

Rh life, of which his son, Erich Schmidt, has given, in his memorial address, a most pleasant picture. "In the magnificent scenery," he says, "among which he often wandered with his growing children, with warm-hearted men around him, sure of the increasing affection and capacity of his students, he reached his culmination as a naturalist and as a man. He was active in every direction. The university was in a very promising period of its career. A medical faculty was required, and that magnified his function. He also represented his department in the Johanneum, and presided over the museum. He went every year to Dalmatia while he was composing his monograph on the sponges, and made experiments in their artificial cultivation, being given one year a small war steamer at his disposal. These journeys were doubly enjoyed when Franz Unger went with him to Lesina or to the Ionian Islands. He and the great botanist had a close community of interests, and it was an inestimable privilege, during the great scientific crisis, to stand shoulder to shoulder with an older man, who to power of following philosophical intricacies united the habit of the most exact research with finely trained effort and suggestive intuition. Together the two devoted themselves to the study of Darwinism, at first opposed to it, as is shown by one of Schmidt's printed essays, but soon becoming impressed with the conviction that all scientific progress was connected with that revolution, and finally Schmidt gave all his energy to the advancement of it. As Rector Magnificus—the first Protestant to wear the golden chain at an Austrian university—he declared himself, in his inaugural address, for Darwinism with a resoluteness peculiar to him, and neither the silly demonstrations of the theological students nor the wrath of Cardinal Rauscher could intimidate him from the indication of free investigation. . . . The rectoral year 1865-66 was also the year of the Austro-Prussian War, and he now proved that the rashly progressive man to whom the whole clash of opinions was a bath of steel also possessed a considerable measure of self-control. He bore himself correctly in every sense in his difficult position, and, without turning his back upon his native Prussia, he so completely devoted himself to the care of the wounded as to receive a note of thanks from the General Archduke Albrecht. Having been chosen a deputy to the Landtag, his voice was always heard in favor of the Liberal side. He served indefatigably in the communal council and the school board. The Protestant communes depended upon him as one of their most effective champions, even to the end of the partisan contest. Besides all this many-sided scientific and public-spirited activity, Schmidt had time to describe the lower animals for Brehm's Thierleben, and to write a number of popular