Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, September 1899: Vol. LV, May to October, 1899Various
Science
Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, September 1899: Vol. LV, May to October, 1899
Various
Science -- Periodicals; Technology -- Periodicals
thanks from the General Archduke Albrecht. Having been chosen a deputy
to the Landtag, his voice was always heard in favor of the Liberal
side. He served indefatigably in the communal council and the school
board. The Protestant communes depended upon him as one of their most
effective champions, even to the end of the partisan contest. Besides
all this many-sided scientific and public-spirited activity, Schmidt
had time to describe the lower animals for Brehm's _Thierleben_, and
to write a number of popular treatises. A lively social disposition
bound him to numerous colleagues, and on the whole he felt so much at
home in Grätz, especially after he had a new institute and a share in
the direction of a zoölogical station at Trieste in prospect, that he
had no thought of a change. He declined invitations to Marburg and
Dorpat. He was always favored by the Government, and kept the marks of
its consideration faithfully in memory."
Ludwig von Graff describes three plainly marked periods in Schmidt's
scientific career. The first, the beginning of which coincided with
his entrance into his scientific professorship, was characterized by
his labors on the _Turbellaria_, from which he was only occasionally
diverted during his residence at Jena and Cracow. "The observations on
infusoria, radiates, and tapeworms, the structure of the annelids and
the development of the mollusks, the descriptions of new amphibia, and
the important discovery of the crustacean nature of the peltogasters,
were, we might say, only rests in the uninterrupted course of the
_Turbellaria_ studies; and that Schmidt was constantly returning to
them was not merely because particular interest had been devoted to
them in Germany at that time only by M. Schultze and R. Leuckart, for
other animal groups had fared no better among the then small number of
scientifically working zoölogists, but Schmidt had won his earliest
scientific fame with his little book on the fresh-water _Rhabdocoelas_
(1848), and had by means of it entered the circle of recognized
investigators. He gave in this book the first connected presentation
of the whole organization of a group of animals, the diversity and
great abundance of which in fresh water were hardly suspected, and the
anatomy of which consisted of few and imperfectly understood isolated
data; described new systems of organs in them, and based an improved
classification on their remarkably complicated and variously graded
structure, with new families, genera, and species. The little book was
therefore received with much interest. A journey to the Faroe Islands
in 1848, and his first excursion to Lesina in 1852, followed in 1856
by a journey from Cracow to Nice and Naples, enabled him to increase
the number of new species, and permitted an insight into the great
diversity of forms, without, however, giving him time for accurate
anatomical investigations, for the nature of the objects promised a
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