of a golden chain and a miniature of the Emperor.' Gundling was accordingly presented with a miniature set in diamonds. Assessment English sources have tended to emphasise Gundling's supposed character flaws and misfortunes at the expense of his learned achievements. German sources take a range of views. All are constrained by the fact that the main extant source of information about Gundling is a one-sided diatribe, published four years after his death, by his hated enemy Fassman. Until around the mid-18th century there were fairly balanced judgments about Gundling. Goethe's great-uncle commented: "His published books, all of which are thoroughly written, are without much spirit. It seems therefore, as if the king wanted to make a learned man play-act to soldiers.". The "Nürnbergischen scholar-Lexicon" of 1755 states: "... but he was ridiculed all over the court. His contributions to scholarship nevertheless remain very great and his writings ... are held, without exception, to be thorough". The more the Age of Enlightenment progressed, the less Gundling's work was held in esteem. By 1750 the Academy of Sciences was keen to distance themselves from their own inglorious history under the Soldier King, and stories about the arbitrary and vicious behaviour of their former President were not something they wished to preserve the memory of. In contrast a 1795 biography detailed the foolish, tragicomic adventures of Gundling, but his merits as a scholar hardly found mention. This remained the standard approach until the mid-19th century. After that, the view of Gundling changed again, in a double sense. On one hand, liberal historians re-evaluated the time before the Enlightenment: Gundling's scholarly qualifications were highlighted and the barren intellectual climate during the lifetime of the soldier king bemoaned. On the other hand, in the last third of the 19th century, Prussian historians tried to finesse away a view of history in which an ancestor of the ruling Hohenzollerns was responsible for the scandalous treatment of science in general and of Gundling in particular. In their version, the weak-minded court scholar basically had himself to blame for his own fate. Up to the present day there continue to be attempts of many different sorts to do justice to Gundling, some of which concentrate almost exclusively on his vanity, his drunkenness and the resulting "fun" while others take a sharply differentiated, source-critical view, which brings his significant scientific achievements into consideration. List of Works Life and Deeds