It must have been disturbed self-awareness that caused a professor of natural history from Salzburg to box the ears of one of his pupils, for no reason at all, according to the pupil, who had then lost his hearing. The pupil’s father, a master plasterer who had visions of sending his son to the Technical University in Vienna and making a famous architect out of him, had an acquaintance who was an officially sworn appraiser calculate the sum his son would have earned by his sixty-fifth birthday if he had pursued in orderly fashion—as the expert witness’s testimony states—and successfully attained the career goals his father had intended for him, and he sued the professor of natural history for this amount. The sum of 230,000,000 schillings was the minimum sum that would be accepted and was thus to be recovered, stated the expert witness on the instructions of the father of the son who had been struck deaf and who had leaped into the well-known Liechtenberg gorge three days previously. The proceedings were adjourned. The professor of natural history was suspended for several months because the mistreatment of schoolchildren is forbidden. He testified before the arbitration tribunal charged with his case that he had forgotten that corporal punishment had long since been forbidden.