The matter, however, one way or the other, is of little consequence, for Nietzsche's mind embodied universal traits: it was uncommonly free from distinctly national characteristics. All the important facts of his life and of his immediate ancestry are known to us. He was born at Röcken, a little village in the Prussian province of Saxony, on October 15, 1844. The day was the anniversary of the birth of Friedrich Wilhelm IV, King of Prussia, and Nietzsche was christened Friedrich Wilhelm in honour of the event. The coincidence was all the more marked by the fact that Nietzsche's father, three years previous, had been tutor to the Altenburg Princesses, in which capacity he had met the sovereign and made so favourable an impression that it was by the royal favour he was living at Röcken. There were two other children in the Nietzsche household--a girl born in 1846, and a son born in 1850. The girl was named Therese Elizabeth Alexandra after the Duke of Altenburg's three daughters who had come under her father's tutorship. Afterward she became the philosopher's closest companion and guardian and his most voluminous biographer. The boy Joseph, named after the Duke of Altenburg himself, did not survive his first year. The longevity and hardiness which marked the stock of Nietzsche's ancestors does away with the theory, often advanced, that his sickness and final mental breakdown were the outcome of hereditary causes. Out of his eight great-parents only two failed to reach the age of seventy-five, while one reached the age of eighty-six and another did not die until ninety. Both of his grand-fathers attained to the age of seventy, and his maternal grandmother lived until she was past eighty-two. Furthermore, the Nietzsche families for three generations had been very large and in every instance healthy and robust. Nietzsche's grandmother Nietzsche had twelve children, and his grandmother Oehler had eleven children--both families being strong and free from sickness. Nietzsche himself, so his sister tells us in her biography, was strong and healthy from his earliest childhood until maturity. He participated in outdoor sports such as swimming, skating and ball playing, and was characterised by a ruddy complexion which in his school days often called forth remarks concerning his evident splendid health. It seems that only one physical defect marked the whole of his younger life--a myopia inherited from his father. This impediment, though slight at first, became rapidly aggravated by the constant use to which he put his eyes in his sedulous application to study.