The wholesome influence of large surroundings upon students is perhaps even more marked than upon professors. History teaches us with singular clearness that small towns are precisely the ones in which student character is distorted out of all proportion. No better example can be found than the University of Jena. From the time of its foundation down to the present century the name of Jena stood for all that was wild, absurd, and outrageous. In a village whose permanent population did not exceed four thousand, students were crowded by hundreds and thousands. To speak without exaggeration, they ruled Philistia with a rod of iron, in defiance of law and order, and not infrequently of decency itself. On this point we have an eye-witness of unquestionable veracity. In 1798, Steffens, a young Dane brimful of enthusiastic admiration for German learning, arrived in the course of his travels at Jena. He gives the following account of his first impressions of German student manners:[3] "I looked out into the neighborhood so strange to me, and a restless suspicion of what was to come ran through my mind. Then we heard in I the distance a loud shouting like the voices of a number of men, and nearer and nearer they seemed to come. Lights had been brought shortly before, and, as the uproar was close upon us, a servant burst in to warn us to extinguish them. We asked with curiosity why, and what the shouting mob wanted. We suspected, indeed, that it was students. The servant told us that they were on their way to the house of Professor A----, who was unpopular with them--I knew not why--to salute him with their Pereat, or college damnation. The cry of some hundred students grew plainer and plainer. 'Out with lights!' was called, and just then we heard the panes of glass clatter when the warning was not quickly enough complied with. I confess that this circumstance, occurring so soon after my arrival, filled me with a kind of gloom. It was not such things as this that had called me to Jena: these were not the voices which I had wished and expected to hear, and my first night was a sad one." [Footnote 3: _German Universities_. Translated by W.L. Gage. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co., 1874. Steffens little imagined at the time that he was destined to become a German professor.]