In Friedrich Schlichtegroll's Nekrolog auf das Jahr 1799 (Necrology for the Year 1799, 1805) Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, born on 1 July 1742 as the seventeenth child of the Ober-Ramstadt pastor Johann Conrad and Henriette Catharina Eckhard Lichtenberg, is eulogized as a famous teacher of physics, one of the nation's wittiest writers and scholars, and "einer der glücklichsten Kämpfer gegen jede Torheit" (one of the most successful warriors in the battle against foolishness). Johann Wolfgang von Goethe admired his uncanny knack for characterization; Arthur Schopenhauer praised his philosophical originality; Tolstoy ranked him with the best German minds; in the twentieth century Karl Kraus, Kurt Tucholsky, André Breton, Sigmund Freud, and Ludwig Wittgenstein acknowledged their indebtedness to him. Lichtenberg, who gave the aphorism its modern form in German literature, was a keen witted writer with inexhaustible insight into the human condition. He was also an astronomer; a mathematician; Germany's first...