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lectures, botanical excursions, and so forth, in order to eventually qualify myself for a professorship, for which there were some prospects at the time. I had a particular inclination toward natural history The study of organisms and the natural world especially because I hoped to be able to provide it with some growth through various investigations. In general, I felt an irresistible urge within me to make myself noticed through something—be it through scientific discoveries, or through an invention, or otherwise through an undertaking deviating from the ordinary course of things*)—a small vanity which one will find very pardonable, as it drove me to greater effort, and a distant hope of its fulfillment alone was able to prevent me from being completely depressed by my circumstances.

Quite late, namely only in my 19th year, I had begun to learn to play the piano a little, and afterwards read various writings on the art of music Tonkunst: the theory and aesthetics of music, whereby I found that its physical-mathematical foundations had been worked out far more deficiently than many other branches of natural history; for this reason, I believed that there would be the most to discover therein. In some experiments that I conducted on the known vibrations of strings, and on the vibrations of a rod first determined by Daniel Bernoulli and L. Euler Daniel Bernoulli (1700–1782) and Leonhard Euler (1707–1783) were pioneering mathematicians in fluid dynamics and mechanics, experience agreed completely with theory. However, with many sounding bodies, that which had been said about them was not confirmed by experience, and I found instruction nowhere regarding the modes of vibration and tonal ratios of various types of sounding bodies. Among other things, I had noticed that every glass or metal disc, if not too small, gave various tones if I held and struck it in different places, and I wished to know the reason for this difference in tones, which had not yet been investigated by anyone. I clamped a brass disc, which belonged to a grinding machine, into a vice by a pin located in its center, and noticed that by strokes with a violin bow, various tones could be produced upon it, which were stronger and more sustained than those one can obtain by striking. That not only strings, but also other elastic bodies can be made to sound by stroking with a violin bow is no invention of mine, as the iron violin A musical instrument consisting of metal rods played with a bow had long been known, and I also had reports of one in Italy by the—

*) — — — "a way must be tried, by which I too can lift myself from the ground" original: "tentanda via est, qua me quoque possim Tollere humo" — a quote from Virgil's Georgics, Book III — often occurred to me in this regard.