Germany [Part I]

	Charles Palache. Undated photo. Courtesy of Judith Palache Gregory.

Mother and I started on the Overland sometime in April. I had never been out of California, Mother I think had not been outside the State since she had arrived forty years before with the covered wagons. She was able to enjoy the trip and was interested in everything she saw. At the crossing of the Green River at North Platte she recognized one of the landmarks of her long outward journey. At Chicago we stayed long enough to drive to the grounds of the World's Fair, but it was a sorry sight, abandoned and ravaged by fire. In New York Cousin Horace called at the hotel end when we went on board the steamer we found a basket of fruit he had sent. I recall my dismay at finding it chiefly composed of what I took to be uneatable "Chinese oranges" and I threw overboard all the grape fruit.

The voyage to Bremen was uneventful. Mother was well enough to sit on deck most of the time and we had no storms. I can still recall seeing the green fields above the chalk cliffs as we ran up the Channel, but no details of that first voyage remain. We reached Bremen in the morning after a long, slow run up the river Weser. I remember the amusement caused by the tiny freight cars, the cattle in the fields with blankets over them and the tiny hay cocks each capped with a canvas cover. It must have been a rainy morning. My German had been confined to reading Schiller and scientific papers and I had never heard it spoken except by the unspeakable Prof. Putzger, who had taught us in class. We finally managed to get in the train for Dresden. Disaster nearly overtook us in Leipzig. I thought we might as well take a stroll while waiting for the new start, thinking only of the freedom of our own stations. We got outside a grating and might never have got back in time for our train but for a friendly Englishman who explained to the guard at the gate what my German had quite failed to convey.

After a few days in Dresden I went to Leipzig and enrolled myself for the spring semester in that ancient University. I went there to work under Ferdinand Zirkel, one of the two leading petrologists of the time. I found there a young Canadian student, T. C. Walker, just beginning his work and only a little better off than myself as to the German language. However, he helped me find a room and to get familiar with restaurants and the names of standard foods. He is still a very good friend, long Professor of Mineralogy at Toronto and head of the big Royal Museum of Mineralogy there. Zirkel had not yet returned from his vacation and my first enrolment was with Credner, Professor of Geology. I found him giving directions to Walker and to a Japanese student, Koto, for en excursion to the silver mines of Schneeberg. It was suggested that I better join them, which I did. We started off next day—an oddly assorted trio. Walker was in knickerbockers—then little worn—the Jap was the best linguist of the lot, but was sufficiently strange to German eyes and I was also obviously a foreigner. We went into one of the most remote and unfrequented corners of Saxony—the Erzgebirge—and of course had the bad luck to reach Schneeberg on the day of the Jahrmarkt. Doubtless the hotels were full, but it was our strange appearance which caused us to be turned away from every one of them, finally spending the night on benches in the railroad station. However, we had a fine trip and returned to Leipzig with sacks heavy with ores and rocks and settled down to work.

Zirkel proved to be very friendly and as Walker and I were his only graduate students we saw a great deal of him. I soon got so I could understand German lectures, especially Zirkel’s, as he handed us proof sheets of his text book which was just coming out and practically read his lectures from the text. Credner was more difficult to follow. His voice ranged up and down as Professor LeConte's used to do and he ramped up and down behind his desk with nervous energy. Put both of them could speak English fairly enough and both had been in the United States, and in laboratory we got along famously.

Here in Leipzig I heard my first symphonic music, the famous Gewandhaus Orchestra giving a series of Beethoven's works. I went to the theater now and then for the sake of hearing German as much as anything else. And there was now and then an opera.

Zirkel gave me a petrographic problem at once and I did a small research with the microscope and even wrote a short paper on it in German which was published that summer. At the end of the semester I made a short excursion alone to the mining town of Clausthal and climbed the Brocken. Returning to Dresden I spent a short time with Mother and Lizzie, who was little if any improved in health.  I took Mother to Meissen to see the famous porcelain factory. Then I started for Switzerland where the third International Geological Congress was to meet in June. On the way I passed through Baireuth, stopped over a day and was lucky enough to get a ticket to Parsifal— my first real experience of Wagner music. I seem to have enjoyed it intensely, little as that seems likely.

I went to Bern to join an excursion through the Jura Mountains before the Congress. Here I met two Englishmen who became good friends, Professor Sollas of Oxford and Mr. Belinfante, Secretary of the Geological Society of London. The leader was Professor Schmidt of Basel. I enjoyed the days immensely although the Geology was devoid of igneous rocks which were my chief interest.

In the course of the trip we went to the Falls of the Rhine at Scheffhausen and here I found Aunt Sarah staying with a companion and had thus my first visit with our European relatives. At Zurich there was a week of meetings, papers and smell excursions. On the top of the Utliberg on one of the latter, I met Professor Davis of Harvard, a meeting momentous for me, although I could not foresee it at the time. He must have liked my style, for when later I was recommended by Jaggar for a job at Cambridge, he remembered me and advised my being taken on. This he told me many years later.

After the Congress I crossed the Alps afoot with a large party led by Albrecht Heim of Zurich, then the foremost Alpine Geologist. The weather was vile, rain day after day, but I was mad with joy over every thing we saw. The memories of the Sierra, so like and yet so different in every way, were all revived. We crossed a pass afoot on the snow, roped together and in the rain, coming down into the valley of the upper Rhine. Then by carriage over another range by the Lukmanier Pass end so down into Italy to a most welcome dry end warmer climate. The party broke up at Aosta after seeing the great moraines heaped up by the glacier coming down the Aosta valley on the plain of the Po at the mountains' foot. Just such moraines I had seen stretching out at the base of Mount Dana into the Mono Lake desert. Here Belinfante and I joined hands and journeyed by way of Lake Maggiore to the southern foot of the Alps, crossed the Simplon Pass on foot and then the Gemmi Pass to the northern side of the Alps, went by rail in the rain up to Zermatt at the base of the Matterhorn, and by the greatest of good luck had a brief vision of that marvelous peak during a break in the storm. Here we parted and I returned to Dresden.

I found the home party at Louisenhof, a resort in the mountains up the Elbe near Dresden. Lizzie was somewhat better and the outlook more cheerful. I spent a short time with them after the return to Dresden and then left for the winter semester at Munich, traveling by way of Prague, which I found one of the most interesting cities, historically, that I visited in Europe.

At Munich my chief work was to be with Professor Groth, leading mineralogist of Germany, founder and editor of the Zeitschrift fur Kristallographie. I also attended lectures by Weinschenck in petrography. Jealousy and bitter enmity were rife in this Institute, my first introduction to the struggle for recognition and advancement in science then prevalent in German Universities. Religious animosities added to the unrest. Groth was a comical little man who lectured from his text book and trotted around a sort of circular lecture table holding up a crystal or specimen for the class to see. His only laboratory exercises were held on Sunday morning and we were then allowed to handle a few crystals, mounted on stands. He gave me a crystal and his German textbook, assigned me a goniometer and left me to my fate. I had to work out the whole business for myself and hard, repellent work it was. There were several Americans working in Groth's laboratory. Jaggar end Ladd from Harvard, Peck from Rutgers, Eakle from Columbia. As a matter of fact, I got more from Weinschenck, a little-known young petrographer, than from Groth, whom I never saw except formally. With Weinschenck I began the study of some rocks I had brought with me from California. We soon found in their sections a mineral new to science and everyone in the laboratory became much interested in it. I had collected the specimens years before on the Tiburon Peninsula when on a trip with Leslie Ransome, but had overlooked the peculiar nature of these crystals. My material was poor, but I was able to establish its crystal form end to make a poor chemical analysis. Groth was anxious for me to make an immediate announcement of my results, but I was not satisfied with my materiel. I wrote to Ransome, recalling our trip end collecting, telling him what I had found out about the new mineral and asking him to send me more and better material. My letter to him crossed one he had written to me telling me the results of his own examination of the same mineral end of his revisiting the locality and finding an abundance of it. Fortunately we had both chosen to name it in honor of our stimulating teacher Lawson, and lawsonite it became. Ransome's results were so much more complete then mine that, despite Groth's rather indignant protest, I sent him my meager data and let him take the main credit of the discovery. I, however, put his paper into German and it was published in Groth's Zeitschfift as a joint paper. I also finally measured and drew figures of two or three crystals which Groth had given me to work on, and a note was prepared in which they were described.

That winter in Munich was perhaps the happiest, or at least the most intensely occupied period of like extent in my life. I had a room in the Jagerstrasse in which a big porcelain stove kept me comfortable. Here I had breakfast, brought in by the owner, end supper, provided by myself from the Delicatessen near at hand. The midday meal I took at a pension kept by Frau Schulze and her two lively daughters, one of whom had been an opera, singer. The meals were good. Several Americans besides myself boarded there end the conversation was general end mostly in German. Munich is high for a European city and the winter was cold with a good deal of snow. As I had practically never seen snow except in the snowfields of the mountains, I was as excited as a child over the storms. I remember my embarrassment one day when Frau Schulze took me to task in her gentle way for my untruthfulness "How could I have said I had never seen snow", and she handed me the Munich paper with an account of Pullman passengers marooned in twenty-foot snow drifts at Summit, California and threatened with starvation! It took me some time, with my imperfect German, to explain that it was comparable to the Brenner Pass leading over the Alps to the south.

The museums were good, the theater excellent, and there was opera all winter, mostly Wagnerian, costing students next to nothing. As our laboratory work often lasted till six and the opera began at six-thirty, supper was often but a hasty snatch, but there was always a long intermission when beer and a sandwich could be had in the entrance hall.

I went to Dresden for Christmas with Mother and Lizzie. I found them in a sad condition, Lizzie again prostrated and both longing to be at home. It had in fact been decided that they should go home together and I thought I should leave my work and go with them, but it was decided that I should stay and complete my plan. They had taken passage on the steamer Elbe early in January. Why that passage was cancelled and the steamer  - - - - chosen I do not now remember. I went with them to Hamburg. I carried Lizzie down to the carriage and into the train at the station. All the way to Hamburg the country was snow-covered and the weather still cold and stormy. At Hamburg I carried my sister on to the steamer and left the two travelers in their cabin with a sinking heart. Never can I experience a deeper depression than I had as I wandered on the dismal beach at Hamburg, watching the steamer disappear in the fog. Next day, or soon after, came word that the Elbe, the steamer they were to have taken, had sunk in a storm and all on board were lost. I took the train for Berlin, too dispirited to really see anything of the city, and returned to Munich—homesick for the first and I think the only time. But word came in due time that Whitney had met the travelers in New York end had seen them safely across the snow-clad continent, back to the home they both were longing for. So I settled down to work again and forgot my homesickness.

As spring began to draw near I planned a holiday trip to Italy. My instructors gave me elaborate notes for a long trip to mineral localities in the Tyrol. These I was to visit on my way back, as the spring would be late in the mountains. So I provided myself with an endless round-trip ticket to Italy and back, and started off full of excitement over the promise of milder weather and Italian scenes. I went by way of Basel and the Simplon tunnel. When I hoarded the train at Basel for Milan, who should I find there but Professor Walter of Jena, whom I had met end very much liked at the Congress. We passed through Lucerne in a blinding snowstorm, plunged into the great tunnel end came out into blazing sunshine at the Italian foot of the Alps, so satisfying at first all my anticipations.