Highly learned multilingual Holy Roman Emperor who patronized scholars. In The Art of Hunting with Birds, he described the behavior and training of falcons. He was one of the earliest experimenters in Europe. Some of his experiments, however, were more than a little macabre. In one, he locked convicts in an airtight room until they suffocated, then tried to watch their souls escape when he opened the door. He also abandoned babies in the wild (who, of course, subsequently died) to attempt to discover if humans possessed a "natural" language.