His own brief trips and longer excursions should also be mentioned in this connection. A short visit which he paid to Frankfort-on-the-Main in 1815 led a band of school boys there to fit up a private Turnplatz. In September of the next year he was very cordially received by a congress of seventy school inspectors, clergymen, and teachers at Frankfort-on-the-Oder, and delivered an address on gymnastics which made a deep impression. A month’s excursion with eighteen older turners in July and August of 1817 took him through Mecklenburg and Pomerania to the Island of Rügen, in the Baltic. The party was hospitably greeted and entertained by the turners in Neustrelitz, Neubrandenburg, and Friedland, joining with them in exercises on the Turnplatz, or matching strength at tug-of-war and wrestling. They met other turners from Prenzlau, and at Puttbus, before a large audience, gave a sort of gymnastic exhibition with an accompaniment of national songs. Again the next summer he set out with thirteen school boys, intending to be absent four weeks. They journeyed southeast through Hirschberg and Waldenburg to Breslau, spent several days with turners in the Silesian capital, and on the way back visited Liegnitz, Züllichau, and Frankfort-on-the-Oder.[47] Still another agency in the spread of Jahn _Turnen_ is found in the _Burschenschaften_, or general student unions, organized in the German universities as one result of the War of Liberation. Students who had served in Lützow’s Free Corps, the most national of the volunteer regiments, took the lead in forming the first of these at Jena, where it was publicly announced on the 12th of June, 1815. The new association was intended to correct the abuses of the _Landsmannschaften_ or sectional clubs, to promote the physical and moral vigor of its members, and to awaken love for the common German fatherland and a desire to see it free and united. Gymnastics was at once introduced and practised after the Berlin fashion. Jahn watched the inception and spread of the movement with the keenest interest, if he did not himself have a hand in sketching the plan of organization; and he sent to Jena two of his most trusted pupils, Dürre and Massmann, whose activity there was not confined to the Turnplatz. Other Burschenschaften were soon formed in the universities at Halle, Leipsic, Giessen, Heidelberg, Bonn, Erlangen, and elsewhere, and with them wandering students from Berlin, Breslau, and Jena carried the art of the Hasenheide _Turnvater_. Thus Karl Völker, one of the directors of the Jena Burschenschaft, after completing his studies there went to Tübingen in 1818 to accept an invitation from students in that university to help them organize a Burschenschaft and start a Turnplatz. The city offered a site, upon condition that the boys in its _Bürgerschule_ and _Gymnasium_ should be allowed a share in the exercises.[48]