A Professor of Mineralogy, Otto Leidenbrock

Otto Leidenbrock had no mischief in him. But unless he very considerably changes as he grows older, at the end he will be a most original character. His teaching was as the German philosophy calls it, subjective. It was to benefit himself, not others. 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 fought with willful words that refused to pass his struggling limbs. Sometimes he might irretrievably injure a specimen by his two great ardour in handling it. Yet united in the genius of a true geologist with the keen eye of a mineral