

PROFESSOR IN BERLIN 283 



it had seemed (or, at any rate, his opponents said it had seemed) 

 as if there had been a radical contrast between their scientific 

 labours, and a certain depreciation of each other's work. Even 

 in the early letters to du Bois-Reymond it had been apparent 

 how highly Helmholtz appreciated the ready help which 

 Magnus gave to young men of science, free as it was from 

 all professional jealousy, as well as (the point now more par- 

 ticularly emphasized) the faithful, patient, modest industry with 

 which he invariably worked on till no further improvement was 

 possible, and which, when he noted the same trait in any of his 

 pupils, made him hail them as his personal friends. 



The germs of the Physical Society of Berlin had been sown 

 in the Conferences which Magnus had held on stated evenings 

 in the form of discussions and reports on physical problems at 

 his own house ; and it was there, in the winter of 1847, that 

 Helmholtz, while repeating his experiments on the function of 

 yeast in alcoholic fermentation in Magnus's Laboratory, had 

 made the acquaintance of Wiedemann. 



'At that time there were no lectures on Mathematical 

 Physics/ he wrote twenty years later in the congratulatory 

 address dedicated to Gustav Wiedemann, and contributed to the 

 Jubilee volume of theAnnalen: 'G. Wiedemann and my self, being 

 ambitious to learn something of mathematical physics, to which 

 we were incited by Gauss's magnetic investigations, agreed to 

 study some of Poisson's works together in private, e. g. his 

 theory of elasticity, which we did with great regularity and 

 profit.' 



The works of Magnus obtained undying fame from the classic 

 perfection of his method, and the accuracy and reliability of his 

 results. 



Helmholtz esteems him happy in that he was permitted to 

 strive in pure inspiration towards ideal principles. ' Of such 

 men it can be said that they are not hampered by an envious 

 destiny, since, working for pure aims, and with a single heart, 

 they find satisfaction even without external results.' 



The main interest in this lecture, however, attaches to Helm- 

 holtz's general observations upon different methods of physical 

 research, which convey some notion of the revolution that had 

 taken place in the past thirty years. Magnus was not one of 

 those investigators who embraced the extremes of modern 



