Julius Meyer, most often known as Lothar Meyer, was the son of a prominent physician and a physician's daughter. Although Lothar intended to become a physician, physical frailties temporarily ended his education at age fourteen. His father, believing that an avoidance of all mental exertion would cure Lothar's severe headaches, secured for him a gardener's position at the grand duke of Oldenburg's summer palace. Within a year a vast improvement in his heath allowed Meyer to return to studies. After graduating the Gymnasium at Oldenburg in 1851, he began medical studies at the University of Zurich, but after two years he transferred to Würzburg which granted him an M.D. in 1854. Fascination with the chemistry of gases as exhibited by his dissertation, "On the Gases of the Blood," led him to Heidelberg to study with Robert Bunsen, the era's authority in gasometric analysis. In 1858 the University of...