The Last Leaf / Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America and Europe

by James Kendall Hosmer

In England, in the fall of 1870, I missed an opportunity to see the great scientific men of the time. Faraday was still active, and in the full ripeness of his fame. Huxley, Tyndall, Darwin, Sir Joseph Hooker, Joule, Lyell, Murchison were in the midst of their best work, and probably all or most of them were present at the meeting of the British Association, which took place that year somewhere in the west of England. Miss Frances Power Cobbe, with whom I had for some time maintained a correspondence, growing out of the interest I felt in her Intuitive Morals, and other writings, invited me to accompany her to the meeting, at which, introduced by her, I might have had interesting interviews. I let the chance go by, and feel to-day that my memory stands impoverished in that it holds no first-hand knowledge of the lights, who in their century were the glory of their country and the world.

In Germany I was more fortunate. Arriving at Heidelberg at a time before its high prestige had suffered much diminution, I found in all the four Faculties men of great distinction. One hears that in the stern centralising to which since 1870 Germany has been subjected the outer universities have suffered, their strength, their able teachers, namely, being drawn away for a brilliant concentration at Berlin. In the little university town of those days students and professors rubbed closely and great men were sometimes found in odd environments. Expressing once a desire to see a certain venerable theologian of wide fame, I was told he was sure to be found on such and such evenings in a well-known bier locale, and there I had opportunity to observe him, an aged and withered figure, with a proper stein of the amber fluid frothing at his side, and a halo from an active pipe enwreathing his grey hair, as he joked and gossiped familiarly with his fellow-loiterers about the heavy oak table. At another time I was among surroundings less rough, the guest-room of a club of the finer world, curtained and carpeted, and made attractive with pictures, flowers, and music. A company of ladies and gentlemen sat sipping Maiwein and Mark gräfler, while a conjurer entertained them with his tricks. During one of these, desiring a confederate from the lookers-on, he approached a slender and refined-looking man, who was following the necromancer's proceedings with as much interest as anybody. The wizard's air of deference, and the respectful looks of the company led me to infer that he was a man above the common, but he took part affably in what was going on, helped out the trick, and laughed and wondered with the rest when it succeeded. I presently learned to my surprise and amusement that the amiable confederate of the conjurer was no other than the physicist Kirchoff, then in fresh and brilliant fame as the inventor of the spectroscope and the initiator of the scientific method known as spectrolysis. The fact has long been known that a prism properly contrived will decompose a ray of white light into the seven primary colours, but the broad and narrow bands running across the variegated scheme of the spectrum had either escaped notice or been neglected as phenomena not significant. Now came, however, my genial fellow-guest of the Heidelberg Club, detecting that the lines of the spectrum were one thing or another according to the substance emitting the light, and forthwith the world became aware of a discovery of vast moment. The light of the sun, and of the stars more distant than the sun, could be analysed or spectrolised, and a certain knowledge was shed of what was burning there in the immensely distant spaces. We can know what constitutes a star as unerringly as we know the constituents of the earth. Still more, among the supposed elements to which painstaking chemists had reduced composite matter, many were found by the all-discerning prism to be not ultimate, but themselves susceptible of subtler division. In fact here was a method of chemical and physical analysis, much more powerful, and also more delicate, than had before been known, and the idea of the scientists as to the make-up of the material universe deepened and widened wondrously. I sat often among the crowd of students in Kirchoff's lecture-room, watching the play of his delicate features as he unravelled mysteries which till he showed the way were a mere hopeless knot. Near him as he spoke, on a table were the wand, the rings, the vials, above all a spectroscope with its prisms, the apparatus with which the magician solved the universe. Once, as I stood near him, he indicated in a polite sentence, with a gesture toward the table, that I was free to use these appliances. In the depth of my unknowledge I felt I could not claim to be even a tyro, and was duly abashed beneath the penetrating eye. But it is interesting to think that for a moment once I held the attention of so potent a Prospero.

In those days the name of Kirchoff was coupled always with that of an associate, the chemist Bunsen, when there was mention of spectrum-analysis; and in my time at Heidelberg, Bunsen was at hand and I became as familiar with his figure as with Kirchoff. In frame Bunsen was of the burly burgomaster type not rare among the Teutons, and as I saw him in his laboratory to which I sometimes gained access through students of his, he moved about in some kind of informal schlafrock or working dress of ample dimensions, with his large head crowned by a peculiar cap. On the tables within the spaces flickered numerously the "Bunsen burners," his invention, and it was easy to fancy as one saw him, surrounded by the large company of reverent disciples, that you were in the presence of the hierophant of some abstruse and mysterious cult, in whose honour waved the many lambent flames. I think he was unmarried, without domestic ties, and lived almost night and day among his crucibles and retorts, devoted to his science and pupils toward whom he showed a regard almost fatherly. In his lecture-room, in more formal dress he was less picturesque, but still a man to arouse deep interest. He was in the front rank of the chemists of all time, and I suppose had equal merit with Kirchoff in the momentous discovery in which their names are linked.

There was, however, at this time in Heidelberg a scientist probably of greater prestige than even these, whose contemporary influence was more dominant, and whose repute is now, and likely to be hereafter more prevailing. In my walks in a certain quiet street, I sometimes met a man who made an unusual impression of dignity and power. He had the bearing of a leader of men in whatever sphere he might move, massive and well-statured, his dress not obtrusive but carefully appointed, with an eye and face to command. His manner was courteous, not domineering, and I wondered who the able, high-bred gentleman might be, for he carried all that in his air as he passed along the street. It was the illustrious Helmholtz, then in his best years, with great achievements behind him and before. His researches in many fields were profound and far extending. I suppose his genius was at its best when dealing with the pervasive imponderable ether that extends out from the earth into the vast planetary spaces in whose vibrations are conditioned the phenomena of light. No subject of investigation can be more elusive. The mind that could grapple with this and arrive at the secrets and laws of the subtle medium through which the human eye receives impression is indeed worthy of our veneration. Probably, excepting Humboldt, no German scientist in these later centuries has reached such eminence. The fields of the two men were widely different. The one we know best as the scientific traveller, roaming the earth over, and reducing to ordered knowledge what can be perceived of its fauna and flora, of the strata that underlie it, the oceans that toss upon it, the atmosphere that surrounds it. The other roved not widely, but keeping to his lenses and calculations, penetrated perhaps more profoundly. Helmholtz, a well-born youth, began his career as a surgeon in the Prussian army, and his service there, no doubt, contributed to the manly carriage for which he was conspicuous. He married a lady of a noble house of Wuertemberg, and moved in an environment conducive to courtly manners. Heidelberg, like the German universities in general well understood that ability in its teachers, and not a pompous architectural display, makes a great institution. Its buildings were scattered and unpretending. Helmholtz had a lecture-room and laboratory apart, in a structure modern and graceful, but modest in its appeal. Here he discoursed to reverent throngs in tones never loud or confident. It is for wiseacres and charlatans to declaim and domineer. The masters are deferential in the presence of the sublimities and of the intelligences they are striving to enlighten.

In Germany I saw the great lights of science from afar, coming into relations of intimacy only with one or two privat-docents, young men struggling precariously for a foothold. One such striver I came to know well, a young man gifted but physically crippled, who, being anxious to get up his English, as I was to get up my German, entered with me into an arrangement to converse in these alternately. We were about on a par in our knowledge or ignorance of the speech not native to us, and helped each other merrily out of the pitfalls into which we stumbled, according as English or German ruled the time.

I was aghast to find that I had been telling my new German acquaintances that while a married man, I had deserted and cast off my wife and little boy in America, when I meant to say only that I had left them behind during my temporary sojourn. A treacherous inseparable prefix had imparted to my "leaving them" an unlooked-for emphasis. The laugh for the moment was on me, but only for the moment. A little later Knopff was telling me of the old manuscripts in the library illuminated gorgeously by "de pious and skilful monkeys of de Middle Ages." He was a bright fellow, and I have hoped I might encounter his name in some honourable connection. If he survived it was as one of the unbekannt, an affix very dreadful to young aspirants for university honours.

As regards the men who, during the past seventy-five years have so greatly widened our scientific knowledge, I have had contact with those of Germany only for brief periods, and in the outer circle. As to their American brethren, fate has been more kind to me. I have sat as a pupil at the feet of the most eminent, and with some I have stood in the bond of friendship.

Divinity Hall, at Harvard University, has always had a pleasant seclusion. Near the end of its long, well-shaded avenue, it had in the rear the fine trees of Norton's Woods, and fifty years ago pleasant fields stretching before. Of late the Ampelopsis has taken it into its especial cherishing, draping it with a close green luxuriance that can scarcely be matched elsewhere. Moreover it is dominated by the lordly pile of the Museum of Comparative Zoölogy. "Whence and what art thou, execrable shape!" a theologue once exclaimed as the walls were rising, feeling that there must always be a battle between what the old Hall stood for and the new building was to foster. But the structures have gone on in harmony, and many a devotee of science has had hospitable welcome in the quarters intended for the recruits of what so many suppose to be the opposing camp. There was a notable case of this kind in my own time.

One pleasant afternoon a group of "divinities" (Ye gods, that that should have been our title in the nomenclature of the University!) were chatting under one of the western porches. Talk turned upon an instructor, whose hand upon our essays was felt to be soft rather than critical, and who was, therefore, set low. "By Holy Scripture," broke out one, "a soft hand is a good thing. A soft hand, sir, turneth away wrath." The window close by opened into the room of Simon Newcomb, a youth who had no part in our studies, but of whom we made a chum. In those days he could laugh at such a joke as it blew in at his window with the thistle-down,—indeed was capable of such things himself.

It is a bit odd that as I come to write of him, this small witticism of half a century back should thrust itself obstinately into my memory, but after all it may not be out of place. The impression of the greatness of a mountain we get powerfully if the eye can measure it from the waif of seaweed at low tide up to the snow-cap of the summit. At this and similar jokes the boy Simon Newcomb connived, as he moved in our crowd. They were the waifs at low tide from which his towering mind rose to the measuring of the courses of the stars. He came among us as a student of the Lawrence scientific school, muscular and heavy-shouldered from work on shore and at the oar in Nova Scotia. Though not slovenly, he was the reverse of trim. His rather outlandish clothes, pressed once for all when they left the shop of the provincial tailor, held his sturdy elbows and knees in bags moulded accurately to the capacious joints. His hair hung rebelliously, and his nascent beard showed an untrained hand at the razor. But his brow was broad, his eye clear and intelligent, and he was a man to be reckoned with. He was barely of age, but already a computer in the Nautical Almanac office, then located at Cambridge, and we well knew work of that sort required brains of the best. Since Simon Newcomb's death an interesting story has been told about his heredity. His strong-brained father, measuring his own qualities with rigid introspection, discovering where he was weak and where capable resolved that whatever wife he chose should supplement in her personality the points to which he lacked. He would father sons and daughters who should come into the world well appointed; in particular he looked toward offspring who should possess high scientific gifts. With this mind he set out on his courting, and steering clear of vain entanglements with rather preternatural coolness, at last in a remote village, satisfied himself that he had found his complement. He permitted his docile heart to fall in love, and in due course there was born into the world a great man. The wooing has a humorous aspect,—this steering of unruly Hymen! The calculated result, however, did not fail of appearance, and perhaps the world might profit from such an example. I was strongly drawn toward Simon Newcomb by his unlikeness to myself. I was town-bred and he full of strength gained in the fields and along the beach. My own disinclination for mathematics was marked, but I had a vast admiration for a man to whom its processes were easy. We became very good friends. He was a genial fellow, capable as I have said of taking or making a joke, yet his moods were prevailingly serious, and he had already hitched his waggon to a star. Abnormally purposeful perhaps, a cropping out no doubt of heredity, he had set a high mark for himself and was already striving toward it. In an autobiographical fragment he says, referring to his early surrender of his powers to high mathematical work: