RROUNDINGS WERE A MATTER OF
INDIFFERENCE TO A THOROUGHLY OCCUPIED MIND.

Archimedes at the siege of Syracuse--Geoffroy St. Hilaire in the
besieged city of Alexandria--Goethe at the bombardment of
Verdun--Lullo, the Oriental missionary--Giordano Bruno--Unacknowledged
effect of surroundings--Effect of Frankfort on Goethe--Great
capitals--Goethe--His garden-house--What he said about Beranger and
Paris--Fortunate surroundings of Titian.

There are so many well-known instances of men who have been able to
continue their intellectual labors under the most unfavorable
conditions, that your argument might be powerfully supported by an
appeal to actual experience. There is Archimedes, of course, to begin
with, who certainly seems to have abstracted himself sufficiently from
the tumult of a great siege to forget it altogether when occupied with
his mathematical problems. The prevalent stories of his death, though
not identical, point evidently to a habit of abstraction which had been
remarked as a peculiarity by those about him, and it is probable enough
that a great inventor in engineering would follow his usual speculations
under circumstances which, though dangerous, had lasted long enough to
become habitual. Even modern warfare, which from the use of gunpowder is
so much noisier than that which raged at Syracuse, does not hinder men
from thinking and writing when they are used to it. Geoffrey St. Hilaire
never worked more steadily and regularly in his whole life than he did
in the midst of the besieged city of Alexandria. "Knowledge is so
sweet," he said long afterwards, in speaking of this experience, "that
it never entered my thoughts how a bombshell might in an instant have
cast into the abyss both me and my documents." By good luck two electric
fish had been caught and given to him just then, so he immediately began
to make experiments, as if he had been in his own cabinet in Paris, and
for three weeks he thought of nothing else, utterly forgetting the
fierce warfare that filled the air with thunder and flame, and the
streets with victims. He had sixty-four hypotheses to amuse him, and it
was necessary to review his whole scientific acquirement with reference
to each of these as he considered them one by one. It may be doubted,
however, whether he was more in danger from the bombardment or from the
intensity of his own mental concentration. He grew thin and haggard,
slept one hour in the twenty-four, and live