On attaining his sixth year the boy was sent to the common school of his native town. His teachers soon recognised that he possessed no ordinary endowments, and sought to induce his father to entrust him later to a higher institution of learning. His father agreed to this; and the plan was to have been carried out after the boy had passed the middle-class of the common school. How the father contemplated the carrying out of the plan is not known; he died ere the son had yet completed his tenth year. As a considerable number of children from Frankfort-on-the-Main and its neighbourhood, attended that time Garnier’s Institute at Friedrichsdorf, near Homburg, the idea occurred to his guardian and his grandmother to entrust the boy to this school. He entered there when in his eleventh year. “The foreign languages, English and French, taught in the Institute, attracted me specially. The library of the Institute, rich and well chosen for its size, gave my mind excellent nourishment.” At the end of his fourteenth year he had passed through the school, organised as it then was, and he now went to Hassel’s Institute at Frankfort-on-the-Main. His delight in the study of language induced him to learn Latin and Italian. And here, also, the taste for the study of natural sciences and mathematics appears to have been awakened in him. The lively zeal with which he applied himself to both these disciplines induced his teachers to advise his guardian that he should allow the boy to attend the Polytechnic School at Carlsruhe, on finishing his course at the Institute. “All the endeavours of my well-wishing teachers shattered themselves, however, against the will of one of my guardians, who was also my uncle. He wished that I should follow mercantile pursuits.... I wrote him at that time that I should, indeed, be obedient and learn the pursuit prescribed for me, but that I should in any case continue my studies later.” On the 1st of March, 1850, Philipp Reis entered the colour establishment of Mr. J. F. Beyerbach, of Frankfort, as an apprentice. By diligence and punctuality he soon won the esteem of his principal. All his leisure time he bestowed upon his further education. He took private lessons in mathematics and physics, and attended the lectures of Professor R. Böttger, on Mechanics, at the Trade School. And so the end of his apprenticeship arrived. At the conclusion of it he entered the Institute of Dr. Poppe, in Frankfort. “Several of my comrades in this establishment, young people of sixteen to twenty years old, found it, as I did, a defect that no natural history, history, or geography, was taught. We determined, therefore, to instruct one another in these subjects. I undertook geography, and formed from this first occasion of acting as teacher the conviction that this was my vocation. Dr. Poppe confirmed me in this view and aided me by word and deed.”