Carl Wilhelm Scheele was born on the 9th of December 1742 in Stralsund, the capital of Swedish Pomerania, where his father was a merchant and a burgess. He was the seventh of eleven children. After receiving his education, partly in a private school, partly in the public school (_gymnasium_) at Stralsund, he was apprenticed at the age of fourteen to the apothecary Bauch in Gothenburg. In those days an apothecary was in large measure a manufacturer as well as a retailer of drugs. He had to prepare his medicines in a pure state from very impure materials, as well as to mix them in order to carry out prescriptions; and, indeed, he himself often, as sometimes happens still, ventured to prescribe in mild cases. Scheele’s master taught him such methods, and in addition instructed him in the use of the chemical symbols in vogue at that date; these he afterwards freely employed in his manuscripts, and this renders them exceedingly difficult to decipher. There still exists a catalogue of the drugs his master kept; many of them are of a fantastic nature, such as “ointment of vipers”, “human brain prepared without heat”, etc.; but among them were many of the well-known salts of metals, and the commoner acids, besides phosphorus, sulphur, rock-crystal, some ores, and some carbon compounds; for example, benzoic acid and camphor. There was a fair chemical library, which included the works of Boerhaave and Lemery, and his master devoted much pains to his instruction. In a letter to Scheele’s father, however, he expressed a fear that too great devotion to study and experimental work would undermine the health of a growing lad.