1895.] The Physical Work of von Helmholtz. 481 



WEEKLY EVENING MEETING, 



Friday, March 8, 1895. 



Sir Frederick Abel, Bart. K.C.B. D.C.L. LL.D. F.R.S. 



Vice-President, in the Chair. 



Professor A. W. Euckee, M.A. F.E.S. M.B.L 



The Physical Work of von Helmholtz. 



The career we are to consider this evening was a career of singular 

 distinction. In days when the range of " natural knowledge " is so 

 vast that most workers are compelled to be content if they can add 

 something to one or two of the sub-divisions of one of the main 

 branches of science, von Helmholtz showed that it is not impos- 

 sible to be at once a great mathematician, a great experimental 

 physicist, and, in the widest sense of the term, a great biologist. 



It was but eight months yesterday since he delivered his last 

 lecture ; it is six months to-day since he died, and the interval is 

 too short for us to attempt to decide on the exact place which will 

 be assigned to him by posterity ; but making all allowance for the 

 fact that each age is apt to place its own great among the greatest, 

 making all allowance for the spell which his name cast over many 

 of us in the lecture rooms where we ourselves first gained some 

 knowledge of science, I am sure that I only express the views of all 

 those who know his work best, when I say that we place him in the 

 very front rank of those who have led the great scientific movement 

 of our time. This opinion I have now to justify. I must try to 

 convey to you in some sixty minutes an outline of the work of more 

 than fifty strenuous years, to give you some idea of the wide range 

 of the multifold activities which were crowded into them, of the 

 marvellous insight with which the most diverse problems were 

 attacked and solved, and, if it may be, some image of the man him- 

 self. The task is impossible, and I can but attempt some fragments 

 of it. 



The history of von Helmholtz is in one respect a simple tale. 

 There are no life and death struggles with fate to record. His work 

 was not done with the wolf at the door, or while he himself was 

 wrestling with disease. He passed through no crises in which success 

 or failure, immortality or oblivion, seemed to depend on the casting 

 of a die. He suffered neither from poverty nor riches. He was a 

 hale, strong man on whom external circumstances neither imposed 

 exceptional disabilities, nor conferred exceptional advantages, but 



