Even
the schoolmaster could not check it. For the mere handful who grew up to
feel wonder and curiosity about the secrets of nature in the nineteenth
century, there were now, at the beginning of the twentieth, myriads
escaping from the limitations of intellectual routine and the habitual
life, in Europe, in America, North and South, in Japan, in China, and
all about the world.
It was in 1910 that the parents of young Holsten, who was to be called
by a whole generation of scientific men, 'the greatest of European
chemists,' were staying in a villa near Santo Domenico, between Fiesole
and Florence. He was then only fifteen, but he was already distinguished
as a mathematician and possessed by a savage appetite to understand. He
had been particularly attracted by the mystery of phosphorescence and
its apparent unrelatedness to every other source of light. He was
to tell afterwards in his reminiscences how he watched the fireflies
drifting and glowing among the dark trees in the garden of the villa
under the warm blue night sky of Italy; how he caught and kept them in
cages, dissected them, first studying the general anatomy of insects
very elaborately, and how he began to experiment with the effect of
various gases and varying temperature upon their light.
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