Page:Czecho-Slovak Student Life, Volume 18.djvu/284

gymnasium (academy), decided with his characteristic determination to become a sailor. However Purkyně took Sachs as a son into his home at Prague, and enabled him to complete his interrupted studies at the Gymnasium.

In the meanwhile Sachs assisted Purkyně by making illustrative wall charts and doing microscopic work. Although Purkyně was genial, cordial, and responsive in his dealings with young people, he was nevertheless a very exacting master in his methods of training. Thus under Purkyně’s tutelage, young Sachs laid the foundations of his deep learning and future greatness. With such a master, Sachs easily passed the entrance examination and was admitted as a student at the University of Prague in 1851. Here young Sachs enjoyed the friendship of a number of instructors, that of Prof. Zimmerman, his teacher of philosophy, being almost paternal. Hence, he was easily led to study Bohemian and was induced by Purkyně to “publish a number of scientific contributions in the Bohemian journal Živa, which he signed with a Bohemian name.” (Dr. F. Noll.)

The work which Purkyně carried on in his laboratory at the U. of Prague was limited exclusively to animal physiology, but this did not matter, for the careful training and insight which the young Sachs had, so to say, inherited from his master easily made him stand out above his comtemporaries. Sachs took his doctor’s degree in 1856, and a year later parted from Purkyně, still continuing to draw and write for a livelihood. However, when Prof. A. Stoeckhards had heard of the water-cultural experiments which Sachs had begun at Prague, he recommended to the government that the scope of the new experiment station at Tharand be extended so that experimental plant physiology might be introduced upon a large seale, and that the “especially well qualified Dr. Julius Sachs of Prague” be called to take charge of the new department. Sachs accepted the call in 1859, changing for a similar one at Chemnitz in 1861, accepting also a professorship in the agricultural academy at Poppelsdorf.

Seven years later, Sachs accepted the chair of plant physiology at Wurzburg, where he remained for thirty years, declining calls to high positions at Jena, Heidelberg, Vienna, Dorpat, Berlin, Bonn, and Munich; for the administration fully complied with the desires of the great investigator, and gave Sachs full recognition.

It was during these thirty years that Sachs reaped the full benefits of the training which Purkyně had given him, and to which he frequently alluded as “harte Arbeit.”

The daily four-hour literary grind, which Sachs contributed during his stay in Prague to Purkyně’s Bohemian journal Živa, coupled with his ability to draw, which he had learned while making wall charts for Purkyně, gave Sachs an advantage comparable