364 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ologists as averse as he to the doctrine of vital forces, and as eager to 

 reduce physiology to applied chemistry, natural philosophy, and math- 

 ematics. He was also one of the founders of the Physical Society of 

 Berlin, whose reports on the progress of natural philosophy are well 

 known to every lover of science. 



In 1867 Du Bois-Reymond was elected one of the secretaries of the 

 Academy of Sciences of Berlin, and this office afforded him the oppor- 

 tunity of displaying, in the public addresses which it imposes on him to 

 deliver, a new side of his genius. He generally chooses some subject in 

 the history of science on which he knows how to throw a new and brill- 

 iant light, as in his essays on Voltaire and on Lamettrie, which have 

 not yet appeared in English. 



Du Bois-Reymond is considered one of the most successful teachers 

 of the university, and the public lectures, in which he yearly alternates 

 between "Anthropology" and "Some Recent Advances in Physical 

 Science," are often dangerously crowded. Having been a good deal in 

 England, and married a lady of English education, he commands the 

 English language sufficiently to lecture in it. The late Dr. Bence 

 Jones, of London, who had formed an intimate friendship with Du 

 Bois-Reymond, and had published an abstract of his discoveries (" On 

 Animal Electricity," etc., London, Churchill, 1852), engaged him re- 

 peatedly to lecture in the Royal Institution, where Dr. Faraday, and 

 other eminent Englishmen of science, were much interested in his ex- 

 periments. In 1855, in the theatre of the Royal Institution, he showed, 

 and described in the Philosophical Magazine, the beautiful method of 

 rendering the deflection of a galvanometer visible by a beam of light 

 reflected from a mirror attached to the needle ; of which method Sir 

 William Thomson subsequently availed himself for the readings of the 

 Atlantic Telegraph so successfully that it has ever since been attrib- 

 uted to that able physicist. 



Du Bois-Reymond is a member of the Academies of Vienna, Munich, 

 and Rome, and an associate of the Royal Societies of London, G5t- 

 tingen, Upsala, etc. He has been employed these last three or four 

 years in erecting in Berlin, at the expense of the German Government, 

 the largest and finest physiological laboratory in existence. His new 

 lecture-room is said to be the most beautiful and best appointed in the 

 world. 



