“Learning annihilates itself, and the most perfect is the first submerged; for the next age scales with ease the height which cost the preceding the full vigor of life.” After leaving the university Bunsen travelled in Germany with young Astor, and made the acquaintance of Frederic Schlegel at Vienna, of Jacobi, Schelling, and Thiersch at Munich. He was all that time continuing his own philological studies, and we see him at Munich attending lectures on Criminal Law, and making his first beginning in the study of Persian. When on the point of starting for Paris with his American pupil, the news of the glorious battle of Leipzig (October, 1813) disturbed their plans, and he resolved to settle again at Göttingen till peace should have been concluded. Here, while superintending the studies of Mr. Astor, he plunged into reading of the most varied character. He writes (p. 51):— “I remain firm, and strive after my earliest purpose in life, more felt, perhaps, than already discerned,—namely, to bring over into my own knowledge and into my own Fatherland the language and the spirit of the solemn and distant East. I would for the accomplishment of this object even quit Europe, in order to draw out of the ancient well that which I find not elsewhere.” This is the first indication of an important element in Bunsen’s early life, his longing for the East, and his all but prophetic anticipation of the great results which a study of the ancient language of India would one day yield, and the light it would shed on the darkest pages in the ancient history of Greece, Italy, and Germany. The study of the Athenian law of inheritance seems first to have drawn his attention to the ancient codes of Indian law, and he was deeply impressed by the discovery that the peculiar system of inheritance which in Greece existed only in the petrified form of a primitive custom, sanctioned by law, disclosed in the laws of Manu its original purport and natural meaning. This one spark excited in Bunsen’s mind that constant yearning after a knowledge of Eastern and more particularly of Indian literature which very nearly drove him to India in the same adventurous spirit as Anquetil Duperron and Czoma de Körös. We are now familiar with the great results that have been obtained by a study of the ancient languages and religion of the East; but in 1813 neither Bopp nor Grimm had begun to publish, and Frederic Schlegel was the only one who in his little pamphlet, “On the Language and the Wisdom of the Indians” (1808), had ventured to assert a real intellectual relationship between Europe and India. One of Bunsen’s earliest friends, Wolrad Schumacher, related that even at school Bunsen’s mind was turned towards India. “Sometimes he would let fall a word about India which was unaccountable to me, as at that time I connected only a geographical conception with that name” (p. 17).