Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, January 1885Various
General
Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, January 1885
Various
American literature -- Periodicals; Literature -- Periodicals
Würzburg is not an industrial town. There appears to be no special
reason why the population and the wealth of the city should increase
rapidly, and yet the old town is surrounded with fine new quarters,
fashionable squares, pretty walks and fine wide streets, handsome
houses and villas. Here, as elsewhere, that singular phenomenon of
our age, the immense increase in the number of well-to-do families,
is distinctly apparent. If this continue in the same proportions, the
“masses” of the future will not be composed of those who live on wages
and salaries, but of those living on profit, interest, or revenue.
Revolutions will become impossible, for the established order of things
would have more protectors than assailants. These countless comfortable
residences, these edifices of all kinds which spring up in every
direction, with their luxurious and opulent appointments, all this
wealth and well-being, is the result of the employment of machinery.
Machinery increases production and economizes labor, and as the wages
of labor have not diminished, the number of those who could live
without working has increased.
Würzburg possesses an ancient University. It is a very old
sixteenth-century building, situated in the centre of the town. As they
recently did me the honor to confer on me the degree of _Doctor honoris
causa_, I wished to see the Rector to offer him my thanks, but I had
not the good fortune to meet him. On the Boulevard, special institutes
have been constructed for each separate science, for chemistry,
physics, and physiology. Immense sums have been spent in Germany to add
a number of those separate institutes to the different Universities.
The eminent professor of chemistry at Bonn, M. Kekulé, recently took
me over the building constructed for his branch of science. With
its Greek columns, and its palatial façade, it is considerably more
extensive than the whole of the old University. The subsoil devoted
to experimental and metallurgical chemistry resembles immense works
or foundries. The professor’s apartments are far more sumptuous than
those of the first authorities. Neither the Governor, the Bishop, nor
even the General himself, can boast of anything to be compared with
them. In the drawing-rooms and dancing saloons the whole town might
be assembled. This Institute has cost more than a million francs.
In Germany it is very rightly considered that a professor who has
experiments to make ought to live in the same building where are the
laboratories and lecture-rooms. It is only thus that he is able to
follow analyses which need his supervision, at times even at night.
Comparative anatomy and physiology have also each their palace. Several
professors of natural sciences complain that it is really an excess.
They say they are crushed by the extent and complications of their
appurtenances, and especially by the cares and responsibilities they
involve; nevertheless, if exaggeration there be, it is on the right
side.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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