In the picturesque town of Meissen, in the district of Cur Saxony, lived an honest and worthy man, Christian Gottfried Hahnemann, an intelligent, patriotic and highly esteemed, though unassuming and unambitious member of that community, by trade a painter upon porcelain, known under the name of Dresden-China. On the 10th day of April, 1755, he was made happy by the birth of a son, whom he named Samuel Christian Frederick. Amidst all the fond hopes the parents cherished for their new-born babe, little did they imagine to what a destiny the great Creator had appointed him. Of the mother of this child not very much is known, save that she was modest, industrious, intensely attached to her family, full of sympathy with her children's aspirations, and ever-ready to aid them in their schemes of pleasure or advancement. The infantile years of little Hahnemann were spent amidst scenery so strikingly beautiful, as to impress his young buoyant heart, even in those tender years, with an admiration of Nature's handiwork, and so instill into him a love of the works of God, which ever increased as he grew older. He was not sent to school very young, not until he was eight years old; this will perhaps partly account for the fact that when he did go, he manifested an ardent thirst for knowledge, which was never slacked during his long life-time. But he did not spend his first eight years of life entirely in play. Those health-securing, physical-exhilarating and developing exercises were occasionally relieved by lessons from his father, and sometimes from his mother, in reading and writing, and by frequent conversations of a religious and moral character. These conversations laid deep the foundation of that undeviating integrity, fixedness of purpose, unwavering conscientiousness and unaffected reverence for the Divine Being, which ever characterized this Medical Reformer in after life. The influence of this paternal conversational instruction and moral training made him what he was, as a school-boy, as a college-student, as an author, a chemist and a physician. Untiring industry, conscientiousness, and a reliance upon Divine blessing, will in any sphere in life secure success, and Samuel Hahnemann was no exception to the general rule. In writing on this subject, he says: "My father had the soundest ideas on what was to be considered good and worthy in man, and had arrived at them by his own independent thought. He sought to plant them in me, and impressed on me more by actions than by words, the great lesson of life, to act and to be, not merely to seem! When a good work was going forward, there, often unobserved, he was sure to be helping, hand to heart; shall I not do likewise? In the finest distinctions between the noble and the base, he decided by his actions with a justness that did honor to the nicety of his sense of right and wrong. In this, too, he was my monitor."