/ 8 Apollo's Laboratory - continued... Self-Perfection In neo-classicism, the fully developed body--naked and godlike, for Winckelmann achieving its highest expression in the Apollo Belvedere--served as the aesthetic norm. One of the forms of Bildung through which less than ideal bodies could approach this unreachable norm was gymnastics. The gym, which in 1840s Berlin was re-establishing itself after a long period of prohibition, was well-known territory to young Du Bois-Reymond. While performing the research for Thierische Elektricität, he served as a "model gymnast" at the Eiselnchen Institute, organizing teams for many different age groups and working out himself on the high bar and parallel bars. The "drive for perfection" that ruled in the gym was also one of the key qualities for successful experimentation. Without "practice in experimentation," one could never solve anything at the experimental table. In a letter to Carl Ludwig, Du Bois-Reymond wrote in 1848: I succeeded very quickly in translating the pain that would have been caused by scalding a frog's leg into an electromagnetic movement. With persistent practice and perfection of the experimental technique, I don't see any reason why I shouldn't also be able to translate the current along the optic nerve--of a pike, for instance--that is so critical for vision, into its magnetic equivalent The notion of "practice" in a physical sense merges easily with the humanistic goal of Bildung. "To perfect oneself through practice," "self-perfection through practice" is a quality of higher organisms, but particularly of human beings, declared Du Bois-Reymond in his lecture, "Über die Übung." From gymnastics to experimentation, one achieved Bildung only through the form-giving power of practice, through the "frequent repetition of a complex bodily activity with the assistance of the mind." Through "frequently repeated experiments and considerable practice" at the experimental table, as Helmholtz indicated, one could finally achieve that simultaneous, implicit knowledge of hand and head. In the context of an increasingly physical Bildung Du Bois-Reymond's drawing of a Greek boy becomes a representation of the fully practiced experimenter. Like a gymnast on the bars, through "practice and perfection," Du Bois-Reymond slowly converts himself in the lab from a crude, organic mass - the untrained nerves and muscles of his own experimenting body - into the ideal form of Apollo. The gaze of the Greek boy in Thierische Elektricität, which is directed toward a frog, suggests Du Bois-Reymond's grandfather's drawings of Lavater's physiognomic stages. Self-perfection through experimental practice shaped the experimenter, who step by step converted himself from an ugly, uneducated frog into an ideal, fully educated Apollo. Reference: Dierig, Sven. 2002. Apollo's Laboratory.. The Virtual Laboratory (ISSN 1866-4784), http://vlp.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/references?id=art8&page=p0007 xlink