A Journey to the Interior of the Earth | Page 6

into the unasked-for shape of a
round and most unscientific oath: then his fury would gradually abate.
Now in mineralogy there are many half-Greek and half-Latin terms,
very hard to articulate, and which would be most trying to a poet's
measures. I don't wish to say a word against so respectable a science,
far be that from me. True, in the august presence of rhombohedral
crystals, retinasphaltic resins, gehlenites, Fassaites, molybdenites,
tungstates of manganese, and titanite of zirconium, why, the most facile
of tongues may make a slip now and then.
It therefore happened that this venial fault of my uncle's came to be
pretty well understood in time, and an unfair advantage was taken of it;
the students laid wait for him in dangerous places, and when he began
to stumble, loud was the laughter, which is not in good taste, not even
in Germans. And if there was always a full audience to honour the
Liedenbrock courses, I should be sorry to conjecture how many came
to make merry at my uncle's expense.

Nevertheless my good uncle was a man of deep learning - a fact I am
most anxious to assert and reassert. Sometimes he might irretrievably
injure a specimen by his too great ardour in handling it; but still he
united the genius of a true geologist with the keen eye of the
mineralogist. Armed with his hammer, his steel pointer, his magnetic
needles, his blowpipe, and his bottle of nitric acid, he was a powerful
man of science. He would refer any mineral to its proper place among
the six hundred [l] elementary substances now enumerated, by its
fracture, its appearance, its hardness, its fusibility, its sonorousness, its
smell, and its taste.
The name of Liedenbrock was honourably mentioned in colleges and
learned societies. Humphry Davy, [2] Humboldt, Captain Sir John
Franklin, General Sabine, never failed to call upon him on their way
through Hamburg. Becquerel, Ebelman, Brewster, Dumas,
Milne-Edwards, Saint-Claire-Deville frequently consulted him upon
the most difficult problems in chemistry, a science which was indebted
to him for considerable discoveries, for in 1853 there had appeared at
Leipzig an imposing folio by Otto Liedenbrock, entitled, "A Treatise
upon Transcendental Chemistry," with plates; a work, however, which
failed to cover its expenses.
To all these titles to honour let me add that my uncle was the curator of
the museum of mineralogy formed by M. Struve, the Russian
ambassador; a most valuable collection, the fame of which is European.
Such was the gentleman who addressed me in that impetuous manner.
Fancy a tall, spare man, of an iron constitution, and with a fair
complexion which took off a good ten years from the fifty he must own
to. His restless eyes were in incessant motion behind his full-sized
spectacles. His long, thin nose was like a knife blade. Boys have been
heard to remark that that organ was magnetised and attracted iron
filings. But this was merely a mischievous report; it had no attraction
except for snuff, which it seemed to draw to itself in great quantities.
When I have added, to complete my portrait, that my uncle walked by
mathematical strides of a yard and a half, and that in walking he kept
his fists firmly closed, a sure sign of an irritable temperament, I think I

shall have said enough to disenchant any one who should by mistake
have coveted much of his company.
He lived in his own little house in Königstrasse, a structure half brick
and half wood, with a gable cut into steps; it looked upon one of those
winding canals which intersect each other in the middle of the ancient
quarter of Hamburg, and which the great fire of 1842 had fortunately
spared.
[1] Sixty-three. (Tr.)
[2] As Sir Humphry Davy died in 1829, the translator must be
pardoned for pointing out here an anachronism, unless we are to
assume that the learned Professor's celebrity dawned in his earliest
years. (Tr.)
It is true that the old house stood slightly off the perpendicular, and
bulged out a little towards the street; its roof sloped a little to one side,
like the cap over the left ear of a Tugendbund student; its lines wanted
accuracy; but after all, it stood firm, thanks to an old elm which
buttressed it in front, and which often in spring sent its young sprays
through the window panes.
My uncle was tolerably well off for a German professor. The house was
his own, and everything in it. The living contents were his
god-daughter Gräuben, a young Virlandaise of seventeen, Martha, and
myself. As his nephew and an orphan, I became his laboratory
assistant.
I freely confess that I was exceedingly fond of geology and all its
kindred sciences; the blood of a mineralogist was in my