Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great ScientistsHubbard, Elbert
Science
Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists
Hubbard, Elbert
Scientists -- Biography
Germany's sympathy for the best in thought has occasionally been broken
in upon by pigmy rulers, who, for the moment, had a giant's power, so it
seems hardly possible that a government which encouraged Goethe should
have banished Wagner. The greatness of Kant was largely owing to the
fact that he was set apart by Frederick and made free to do his work;
and at this time, not another monarchy in the world would have had the
insight to keep its coarse hands off this little man with the big head
and the brain of a prophet.
And as Kant was the greatest and most original thinker of his time, so
today does a German University house the world's greatest living
scientist. Ernst Haeckel has been Professor of Natural History at Jena
for forty-two years. All the efforts of various other Universities to
lure him away have failed. He even declined to listen to the siren song
of Major Pond, and only smiled at the big baits dangled on long poles
from Cook County, Illinois.
"I have everything I want, everything I can use is right here; why
should I think of uprooting my life?" he asked. And yet, Jena, there in
the shadow of the Thuringian Mountains, is only a little town of less
than ten thousand inhabitants.
In Nineteen Hundred Three, there were five hundred pupils registered at
Jena, as against four thousand at Harvard, five thousand at Ann Arbor,
and nearly the same at Lincoln, Nebraska.
It will not do to assume that those who graduate at big colleges are big
men, any more than to imagine that folks who reside in big towns are
bigger than those who live in little villages. Perhaps the greatest men
have come from the small colleges: I believe the small colleges admit
this.
And surely there is plenty of good argument handy, in way of proof; for
while Harvard has her Barrett Wendell, with his caveat on clearness,
force and elegance; and Ann Arbor has Cicero Trueblood, Professor of
Oratory, whose official duty it is to formulate the College Yell; yet
Amherst, with her scant five hundred pupils, has Professor David P.
Todd, the greatest astronomer of the New World. I really wonder
sometimes what a University that stands in fear of Triggsology would do
with Professor Ernst Haeckel, whose disregard for tradition is very
decidedly Ingersollian! The actual fact is, Ernst Haeckel, the world's
greatest thinker, belongs in the little town of Jena, in Germany. At the
village of Coniston, you see the little hall where Ruskin read the best
things he ever wrote, to a dozen or two people.
At Hammersmith, the limit of a William Morris audience was about a
hundred. At Jena, Ernst Haeckel sits secure in his little lecture-hall,
and speaks or reads to fifty or sixty students, but the printed word
goes to millions, so his thoughts here expressed in Jena are shots heard
round the world.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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