kirchoff's

Updated: June 2, 2025

I sat often among the crowd of students in Kirchoff's lecture-room, watching the play of his delicate features as he unravelled mysteries which till he showed the way were a mere hopeless knot. Near him as he spoke, on a table were the wand, the rings, the vials, above all a spectroscope with its prisms, the apparatus with which the magician solved the universe.

James Kendall Hosmer - The Last Leaf : Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America and Europe