Certainly, if seclusion and scholarly traditions are conducive to intellectual achievement, Jena is the place for the thinker. The university, with one thousand eight hundred and seventeen students, is about a third the size of the University of Wisconsin. The population of the city is about the same as that of Madison. But while Madison has other interests, political especially, Jena is absorbed in the university. Its chief industry, the glassworks, is the offspring of the university, for it was through the fortunate collaboration of Ernst Abbé a professor who could figure out indices of refraction, with Carl Zeiss, a glassmaker who was willing to put money into queer formulas, that the new lenses were discovered which make possible our modern photography and microscopy. Generously has the debt that the industry owed to science been repaid, for the Zeiss company has borne a large share of the expenses of maintaining the university and erecting its new buildings, besides giving to the city many public buildings, among them a splendid bathhouse, an auditorium and a free library and reading room, where are on file one hundred and fifteen daily papers and three hundred and sixty periodicals (American librarians, take notice).
From this it may be seen that Jena is an up-to-date town. Yet at the same time it retains more of medieval picturesqueness than most, mingling the new and the old as none but Germans know how to. "_Das liebe närrische Nest_," as Goethe called it, is hidden away among the Thuringian hills so that the railroad was a long time finding it. The cobble-stoned streets stroll out from the market place in a casual sort of a way and change their minds about where they are going without notice, twisting about Gothic churches, diving under old towers, wandering slowly along the banks of the Saale, or starting suddenly straight up hill. The gossipy gables of the old houses lean toward each other like peaked eldritch faces in fluted red caps. So close they stand sometimes that you can touch the walls on either side, and you have to walk with one foot on the sidewalk and the other on the pavement, like the absent-minded German professor who thought he had gone lame. When I saw Jena, I understood something which had long puzzled me, that is, how the dachshund originated. It is manifestly a product of evolution according to the principle of the survival of the fittest, for only a creature constructed according to the specifications "dog and a half long and half a dog high" could make his way with convenience and celerity through this maze of narrow streets. But all sorts of vehicles and beasts of burden get around somehow, too; oxen and horses, automobiles and bicycles, dog carts and women carts. Most in evidence everywhere are the students, who swagger through the town with the consciousness of owning it, their bright-colored corps caps at a cocky angle, and their faces looking like advertisements of the dangers of not using safety razors, for the Jena student has three hundred and fifty years of university tradition to live up to, and he realizes the responsibility of it to the full.