Having finished his elementary schooling at Weissenfels, on the Saale, where his grandfather had served as superintendent, he went in 1836 to the celebrated Royal School at Pforta, of which his father was an alumnus, and whither he himself took his son thirty years later. He was much impressed by the teaching of Koberstein, the historian of literature, who unlocked for him the world of Goethe and of romance; and he went out from Pforta into life with a full conviction that the soundness of our culture depends upon its humanistic foundation. He went to Halle in the fall of 1842 to fulfill his military obligations and study mathematics and natural science, and became interested in other branches. At the Berlin Hochschule, whither he went next, he further broadened the scope of his culture, pursued philosophical studies, and finally settled upon the organic sciences. His interest was gradually diverted from mathematics, and he took up zoölogy with enthusiasm. Johann Müller--whose portrait, his son Erich Schmidt says, in the memorial address from which we draw most of the facts of his life, always adorned his room--permitted him, in 1845, after a summer term in comparative anatomy at Heligoland, to take part in a research upon sea animals, and impressed a stamp on the young investigator's view of Nature that lasted till the Darwinian revolution. Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg interested him in the investigation of the minute life of the infusoria, and, besides being his teacher, had a fatherly affection for him. In 1846 Schmidt obtained a promotion to Doctor of Philosophy at Halle, the subject of his still unprinted dissertation being the sacred _Scarabæus_. He passed the higher teachers' examination in Berlin, and thereby avoided a year of probation at a realgymnasium. In August, 1847, he habilitated himself at Jena. He presented, on the occasion, a paper entitled Morphological Fragments, in which, while the name of Oken was mentioned appreciatively in the introduction, the gap between his philosophy and the current zoölogy was insisted upon. He became Professor Extraordinary of Natural History in this university in 1849, and Director of the Grand Ducal Zoölogical Museum in 1854. While at Jena he published the Handbook of Comparative Anatomy (1849), the Hand Atlas of Comparative Anatomy (1852), and a historical study on the Development of Comparative Anatomy (1855). Some results of a journey to the North in the course of his studies of the _Turbellaria_ were embodied in a lecture on the Faroe Islands (1848), and Pictures from the North, collected during a Journey to the North Cape (1854), a versatile work, in which his sharp powers of observation were well illustrated. A work of somewhat different character was a lecture on Goethe's Relation to the Organic Natural Sciences, which was delivered in the Berlin Singakademie and was printed in 1853.