JOHANNES MULLER 513 



JOHANNES MULLER 1 



By Dr. PHILIP B. HADLEY 



BKOWN UNIVERSITY 



IE" the present day when the individual laborer in the fields of 

 biology is so often lost in the flood of new facts which is con- 

 tinually being poured into the archives of the science; when a narrow 

 specialization and very definite concentration of activity are the pri- 

 mary condition and means for furthering the highest interests of the 

 science as a whole, and when the difficulty is ever increasing, to hold 

 in the foreground the larger and more general problems of biological 

 significance, it may not be altogether inappropriate to recall — we 

 might almost say revive — at times, some of the monumental figures 

 whom the history of every science, at rare periods, brings forth, and 

 to learn once again our debt to them. 



That the times are past when it is permitted a single individual 

 to survey, in full understanding, the broad fields of activity in the 

 realm of general biology must assuredly be considered as a sign of 

 advance. We may even remark that the gradual expansion which 

 physiology alone has undergone during the last half century, in pass- 

 ing beyond the confines of a unitary science and in trespassing — per- 

 haps with right — upon the fields which had at one time belonged to 

 other realms, is a necessary consequent to the death of the last great 

 ruler of the science. For these reasons alone it may be of interest 

 and of profit to recall the single instance of a man who, during his 

 years of " activity, so deeply influenced the drift of physiological 

 thought; and after whose death, the overgrown and no longer self- 

 containing science of physiology burst like a great stream at its mouth, 

 by many and devious channels to reach the sea. 



Johannes Miiller was born in the city of Coblenz on the fourteenth 

 day of July, 1801, the son of Mathias Miiller, a shoemaker. Although 

 a man of small means, the father determined not to deny his son the 

 advantages of a fair education, and accordingly the young lad was 

 sent to the Jesuit school in the place of his birth, then under French 

 control. Here he remained for eight years, pursuing a study of the 

 classics and mathematics and gaining the foundation of that knowl- 

 edge of Greek used so brilliantly in after years in the translation and 



1 On the above subject the writer would acknowledge the especial value of 

 two German works from which he has freely borrowed: A comprehensive treatisa 

 by DuBois Reymond, " Gedachtnissrede auf Johannes Miiller " ; and a brief 

 paper by Max Miiller, in Westermann's Monatshefte for July, 1901. The present 

 paper was first presented in a course of biological seminars at Brown University. 



vol. lxxii. — 33. 



