A History of Science — Volume 5Williams, Henry Smith
History
A History of Science — Volume 5
Williams, Henry Smith
Science -- History
If one follows a band of basket-laden women, he will find that their
goal is that focal-point of every old-time city, the market-place. There
arrived, he will witness a scene common enough in Europe but hardly to
be duplicated anywhere in America. Hundreds of venders of meat, fish,
vegetables, cloths, and household utensils have their open-air booths
scattered all across the wide space, and other hundreds of purchasers
are there as well. Quaint garbs and quainter faces are everywhere,
and the whole seems quite in keeping with the background of
fifteenth-century houses that hedges it in on every side. Could John the
Magnanimous, who rises up in bronze in the midst of the assembly, come
to life, he would never guess that three and a half centuries have
passed since he fell into his last sleep.
This same John the Magnanimous it was who founded the institution which
gives Jena its fame and distinguishes it from all the other quaint
hypnotic clusters of houses that nestle similarly here and there in
other picturesque valleys of the Fatherland--I mean, of course, its
world-renowned university. It is but a few minutes' walk from the
market-place, past the home where Schiller once lived and through the
"street" scarcely more than arms'-breadth wide beyond, to the site of
the older buildings of the university. Inornate, prosaic buildings they
are, unrelieved even by the dominant note of picturesqueness; rescued,
however, from all suggestion of the commonplace by the rugged ruins of
the famed "powder-tower" jutting out from the crest of the hill just
above, by the spire of the old church which seems to rise from the
oldest university building itself, and by the mountain peaks that jut up
into view far beyond.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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