Gauss himself had the honour of becoming the subject of a caricature, one which turned him into a child. Ritmüller shows the mathematician with the head of an adult sitting on a childlike body. Dressed only in nankeen cotton cloth, he was dressed inappropriately for low temperatures, as noted by his daughter from the background. Yet, the physics genius associates a geomagnetic measuring station with the Chinese city of Nanjing and contemplates temporally measurable fluctuations in the earth’s magnetic field: “2 1/3 seconds later”. The global network of the Göttingen Magnetic Association was a hot public topic at the time the drawing was created.
