GutsMuths, son of a tanner in moderate circumstances, was born August 9, 1759, in the ancient Prussian town of Quedlinburg. The boy’s first library consisted of a great Bible illustrated with beautiful copper-plate engravings, an old geography with woodcuts of the different races of men, and, best beloved of all, the “Acerra philologica,” in German. This last book, containing hundreds of selections from the writings of well-known Greek and Latin authors, he read through a score of times, he said, and it may have given him his first introduction to the gymnastics of the ancients. He was also fond of working with tools, and skilful with his pencil and afterwards with brush and paints. In the spring of 1773, while he was in his third year at the _Gymnasium_ or classical secondary school of Quedlinburg, his father died. Four years later, upon recommendation of the prorector of the _Gymnasium_, he became private tutor in the family of Dr. Friedrich Wilhelm Ritter, a respected physician in the town and medical adviser to the then abbess of Quedlinburg, Princess Anna Amelia, sister of Frederick the Great. GutsMuths now found his time fully occupied. Besides preparing his own school tasks, he must teach the two oldest of Dr. Ritter’s four sons and a merchant’s boy whom he had also accepted as a pupil, and to fit himself the better to discharge the new duties he studied carefully Basedow’s “Elementarwerk” (1774) and especially the “Methodenbuch” (1770). In 1779 GutsMuths entered the university of Halle, intending to take up the study of theology; but inclination led him to attend as well courses in mathematics, physics and modern languages (including English and Italian), and pedagogy, too, continued to interest him greatly. After three years in Halle he returned to Quedlinburg to resume his old position in the Ritter household, where there were now six children, five of them boys and the oldest barely nine years old. The next to the youngest, aged three, was Karl, the geographer-to-be. Only two years later, in June, 1784, Dr. Ritter succumbed to a severe attack of typhoid fever. His young widow found herself unable to continue the salary which GutsMuths had been receiving, but he was unwilling to desert the family in its time of need and was easily persuaded to remain for another year in spite of the changed circumstances.