Abstract
II. SCHEELE was born at Stralsund on the 9th December, 1742, the fifth in order of a numerous family. His father was a merchant of limited means who did not intend to give a learned education to his son Carl Wilhelm, who besides, like Linnaeus and Berzelius, is said in his youth to have shown so little disposition for the common classical school studies that he was in danger of being considered the stupidest among his fellows. The Stralsund gymnasium accordingly was soon exchanged for the post of pupil to the apothecary Bauch at Gothenburg. Here Scheele was not kept very long at servile drudgery and mechanical hand labour; his attention to his duties and industrious reading of approved chemical authors soon gained him a place in the laboratory itself, where he not only distinguished himself by steady application and special skill in the accurate making-up of the preparations which belonged to the establishment, but also experimented in the silence of the night in order to satisfy his curiosity. He had now come to the right school bench, and with an experience led astray by no learned theories for his teacher, he laid the foundation of the chemical views and of that skill in chemical manipulation which were to gain for him so famous a name in the history of the natural sciences.
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A Leaf from the History of Swedish Natural Science 1 . Nature 21, 539–541 (1880). https://doi.org/10.1038/021539a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/021539a0