552 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Hoppe-Seyler should be gratefully remembered by posterity for 

 his service in thus putting on its feet and starting in motion a sci- 

 ence the future of which man can but guess at, but which is perhaps 

 fuller of promise for the alleviation of suffering, for the betterment 

 of the conditions of existence of mankind, than any other science 

 or group of sciences, for it holds somewhere within it the keys of 

 the riddles of life, disease, decay, and death. 



In no one way did Hoppe-Seyler set the science further forward 

 than in the founding of a journal, the Zeitschrift filr pJiysiologische 

 Chemie, devoted exclusively to biochemistry. The journal received 

 at the outset both hearty support and hearty opposition, but it still 

 remains as the official organ of publication of biochemical works. 

 Previous to the establishment of this paper, works treating of the 

 chemistry of organisms were scattered in agricultural, chemical, 

 physiological, pathological, and medical journals, just as they are in 

 the English language to-day. They thus lost largely in effective- 

 ness. Hoppe-Seyler brought all biochemical efforts to a focus, with 

 admirable result. 



Hoppe-Seyler as a teacher could be known only by his immediate 

 pupils. Baumann and Kossel have written of him that " with untir- 

 ing patience he introduced the beginner to practical chemistry; no 

 ignorance, no lack of skill exhausted his forbearance." He may be 

 judged, however, by us through the men who were his pupils. 'Ro 

 test of a man's mind is more certain than the influence he exerts 

 upon those who associate with him, particularly his pupils. Judged 

 by this test Hoppe-Seyler must rank very high indeed. Whether it 

 is that a man of his type naturally attracts to him the most promising 

 of the rising generation, or whether even an ordinary man absorbs 

 from such a teacher an amount of light which, like a fluorescing sub- 

 stance, he is enabled thereafter to emit, certain it is that Hoppe- 

 Seyler's pupils include an extraordinary number of men of ability. 

 His pupils and his pupils' pupils are the principal workers in physio- 

 logical chemistry to-day, and a mere enumeration of their achieve- 

 ments would be a history of the development of the science in the 

 last forty years. 



As a teacher Hoppe-Seyler strongly resembled Ludwig, his great 

 contemporary physiologist. Brooks, of Johns Hopkins, AgassLz, and 

 Liebig, the chemist. He offers a striking contrast in this respect to 

 Claude Bernard, whose great genius affected the science of physi- 

 ology principally by its own extraordinarily keen and suggestive re- 

 searches, and when it died left no heirs. 



Such was Hoppe-Seyler — a winning personality, a courageous 

 upholder of what he believed true, a keen investigator, a far-sighted, 

 broad-minded, kind-hearted man. 



