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or (as for instance Osterman in the eighteenth centuryand Nesselrode in the nineteenth) from the German landsproper. The extreme case was the London embassy;between 1812 and 1917 there were nine ambassadors;four of these were Baltic German barons, who betweenthem occupied the post for eighty-three out of thehundred and five years.Both through the Baltic Germans and from Germanyherself Russia absorbed much of Western technique andthought. Study in Germany and the employment ofGerman teachers, professors, naturalists, and scientists,even though many of them at first were very secondaryor unsuitable persons, led already by the second half ofthe eighteenth century to a new era in the sciences,geography, mathematics, and history. Catherine theGreat and Nicholas I borrowed, indirectly or directly,from Prussian educational practice. Alexander I foundedor re-founded four universities on the German model.The Academy of Sciences in the eighteenth century waspredominantly German: only a quarter of its memberswere Russians. In the nineteenth century the positionwas reversed; seventy per cent, were Russians, butGermans accounted for two-thirds of the remainder.Throughout that century, except for a break after the1848 revolutions, Russians frequented German or German-Swiss universities far more than any others.In literature and thought, apart from masonry andreligion (see p. 348), Goethe, especially Werther, Schiller,the German ballads, and Hoffmann combined withthe English pre-romantics, Scott and Byron, to oustFrench pseudo-classicism in Russia in favour of romanticismand the cult of the past. In philosophy, Schelling'sromanticist idealism found ardent devotees in the twentiesand thirties, until his predominance was challenged andin the forties replaced by that of Hegel, the most ramifyinginfluence that has been exerted upon Russian thoughtby any single European philosopher. The 'left-wingHegelians' (Feuerbach and others) spread abroad inRussia nineteenth-century materialism, and its transformerMarx in the generation before 1917, directly andindirectly, exercised profound influence.342