420 HERMANN VON HELMHOLTZ 



progress of Humanity by the widest range of its intellectual 

 faculties, and by the supremacy of intellect over the natural 

 passions, and the resistant forces of Nature, were deeply affected 

 by the intelligence of the death of this pre-eminent genius. 

 Endowed with the rarest gifts of mind and character, he had 

 reaped in his sadly brief career a harvest of almost unhoped for 

 results, the discovery of which during the preceding century 

 had been vainly attempted by the most gifted of his colleagues. 

 In the old classical days, it would have been said that he had 

 fallen a victim to the envy of the gods. Nature and Destiny 

 here seemed in quite unusual fashion to have conspired in the 

 development of a human mind, which combined all requisites 

 for solving the most complex problems of science. His was 

 a mind as capable of the keenest acumen and lucidity of logical 

 thought, as of supreme efforts of attention in observing the 

 more obscure phenomena. The uninitiated often pass these by 

 easily without attending to them ; to the more acute observer 

 they indicate the way in which he may penetrate into new and 

 unknown depths of Nature. 



' Heinrich Hertz seemed predestined to give men such new 

 insight into many depths of Nature hitherto concealed from us. 

 But all these hopes were wrecked by the insidious malady, 

 which as it crept slowly and pitilessly forward, consumed this 

 precious life, and cruelly destroyed the many hopes depending 

 on it. I have personally felt this as a deep grief; for of all my 

 pupils I had ever held Hertz to be the one who had penetrated 

 deepest into my own range of scientific thought, and on him 

 I had founded my surest hopes of its further development and 

 extension/ 



Whether Helmholtz himself, in the heavy fate that befell him 

 in his lifetime in the sickness of both his sons, was not in classical 

 parlance a victim to the envy of the gods, was a question that 

 frequently occurred to many of his friends but all who knew 

 his noble and modest demeanour must reply in the negative. 



The grief felt by the scientific world upon the death of Hertz 

 is expressed in the lines which Boltzmann addressed to Helm- 

 holtz on January 6, 1894, which show the respect felt for the 

 physicist whose life was thus prematurely cut short, and are 

 also characteristic of the temper of the eminent investigator by 

 whom they were written : 



