August Krogh *

Schack August Steenberg Krogh was born in Grenaa, Jutland. His ancestors had emigrated from Holstein and Schleswig, where his father's family had settled as small farmers three hundred years earlier. Krogh's father was a brewer, though he had been trained as a shipbuilder. Ships and the sea were some of Krogh's unceasing interests. Krogh, who was the oldest of six brothers and sisters, had already been taught to read and write by his mother at the age of five. Soon after his sixth birthday she wrote in a letter: "August reads almost too fluently, as he frequently out of sheer eagerness omits the signs. We have begun with German, geography and arithmetic. Next fall, if it please God, I shall hand him over to the secondary school in an adequate state; then he himself must take care of his education." Krogh's aversion to official punctuation remained characteristic of him; he put the punctuation marks as it pleased him. After the summer vacation, at the age of six, he was sent to a small secondary school. According to his own opinion, however, going to school did not markedly influence his development. Outside school he cultivated his early awakened interest in nature. At an early age he was interested in animals and for hours he would follow the behavior of insects and spiders. Likewise, with the help of Rostrup's Flora, he botanized eagerly in the surroundings of Grenaa. At the age of twelve he had read from beginning to end the large popular Danish encyclopedia available at that time. At this early age he also tried his hand at experimenting, performing-though not always successfully-the chemical and physical experiments he had read about. He had to content himself with the limited material within his reach in the small country town, and he himself assumed that this fact helped to develop his later remarkable ingenuity in improvising apparatus from the few and primitive things at his disposal. As a rule, Krogh's apparatus was inexpensive, and he maintained his economizing attitude even after large funds had been put under his control. Also he exhibited by this time a thorough or rather an exaggerated economy with paper; later in his life he used the tiniest possible scraps of paper, a habit which made it seldom easy for others to decipher his writing.