Martin Henry Klaproth, to whom chemistry lies under so many and such deep obligations, was born at Wernigerode, on the 1st of December, 1743. His father had the misfortune to lose his whole goods by a great fire, on the 30th of June, 1751, so that he was able to do little or nothing for the education of his children. Martin was the second of three brothers, the eldest of whom became a clergyman, and the youngest private secretary at war, and keeper of the archives of the cabinet of Berlin. Martin survived both his brothers. He procured such meagre instruction in the Latin language as the school of Wernigerode afforded, and he was obliged to procure his small school-fees by singing as one of the church choir. It was at first his intention to study theology; but the unmerited hard treatment which he met with at school so disinclined him to study, that he determined, in his sixteenth year, to learn the trade of an apothecary. Five years which he was forced to spend as an apprentice, and two as an assistant in the public laboratory in Quedlinburg, furnished him with but little scientific information, and gave him little else than a certain mechanical adroitness in the most common pharmaceutical preparations. He always regarded as the epoch of his scientific instruction, the two years which he spent in the public laboratory at Hanover, from Easter 1766, till the same time in 1768. It was there that he first met with some chemical books of merit, especially those of Spielman, and Cartheuser, in which a higher scientific spirit already breathed. He was now anxious to go to Berlin, of which he had formed a high idea from the works of Pott, Henkel, Rose, and Margraaf. An opportunity presenting itself about Easter, 1768, he was placed as assistant in the laboratory of Wendland, at the sign of the Golden Angel, in the Street of the Moors. Here he employed all the time which a conscientious discharge of the duties of his station left him, in completing his own scientific education. And as he considered a profounder acquaintance with the ancient languages, than he had been able to pick up at the school of Wernigerode, indispensable for a complete scientific education, he applied himself with great zeal to the study of the Greek and Latin languages, and was assisted in his studies by Mr. Poppelbourn, at that time a preacher.