following event seems to me especially worth recording.

When a young and wholly unknown student he had gone to Paris to bring his
discovery of fulminic acid to the notice of the Academy. On one of the
famous Tuesdays he had waited vainly for the introduction of his work,
and at the close of the session he rose sadly to leave the hall, when an
elderly academician in whose hand he thought he had seen his treatise
addressed a few words to him concerning his discovery in very fluent
French and invited him to dine the following Thursday. Then the
stranger suddenly disappeared, and Liebig, with the painful feeling of
being considered a very uncivil fellow, was obliged to let the Thursday
pass without accepting the invitation so important to him. But on
Saturday some one knocked at the door of his modest little room and
introduced himself as Alexander von Humboldt's valet. He had been told
to spare no trouble in the search, for the absence of his inexperienced
countryman from the dinner which would have enabled him to make the
acquaintance of the leaders of his science in Paris had not only been
noticed by Humboldt, but had filled him with anxiety. When Liebig went
that very day to his kind patron he was received at first with gay jests,
afterwards with the kindest sympathy.

The great naturalist had read his paper and perceived the writer's future
promise. He at once made him acquainted with Gay Lussac, the famous
Parisian chemist, and Liebig was thus placed on the road to the lofty
position which he was afterwards to occupy in all the departments of
science.

The Munich zoologist von Siebold we first knew intimately years after. I
shall have more to say of him later, and also of the historian Gervinus,
who, behind apparently repellant arrogance, concealed the noblest human