1891.] 



151 



the language spoken here it was the kindness shown to her by members 

 of the Philosophical Society that enabled her to find employment and to 

 show her mastery of her art and to carry on her scientific work and to 

 write her books. It is eminently fitting, therefore, that this memorial 

 portrait should find its final resting place on the walls of your hall, and 

 that her name and services should be perpetuated in your records. I 

 now, in the name and on behalf of the subscribers, hand over to you and 

 through you to the keeping of the Society, the portrait of Madame Seiler, 

 a member of the Society, a woman of many virtues and talents and be- 

 loved by a large circle of friends, who have joined in thus testifying their 

 sense of the honor conferred on her by this Society and of her eminent 

 right to it. 



The President accepted the portrait in a few appropriate 

 remarks. 



Mrs. J. P. Lesley then read the following sketch of Madame 

 Seiler : 



Mrs. Emma Seiler was born on the 23d of February, 1821, at Wurtz- 

 berg, in the kingdom of Bavaria. Her maiden name was Diruff, and her 

 father was court physician to Luclwig, King of Bavaria, and also Surgeon- 

 General to the kingdom. Emma Diruff had two brothers and two sisters. 

 One of her sisters afterwards married Dr. Canstadt, a celebrated physician 

 and professor at Jena, who also started a medical journal, which is still in 

 existence. Her other sister married Dr. Demme, professor of surgery at 

 Berne, and brother of a distinguished Lutheran clergyman of that name, 

 formerly settled in Philadelphia. 



The children of Dr. Diruff were on familiar terms with the young 

 princes and princesses at the court of King Ludwig, and occasionally 

 shared their lessons with the same tutors and professors, and Emma grew 

 up in close intimacy and friendship with the princesses, and with the 

 young Maximilian, and Otlo, King of Greece. She lived in the atmos- 

 phere of court life, was early presented, and the king and queen valued 

 highly their intercourse with the family of the court physician. To our 

 American ideas these are trifles, but unless we understand all the early in- 

 fluences of a young life, we cannot realize what one must have to over- 

 come in later years when living among people to whom all such distinc- 

 tions are purely artificial. 



Her early youth was a very happy one, devoted to her education, in the 

 heart of a family circle of sufficient wealth to be free from serious anxie- 

 ties and cares, and their home in the midst of beautiful scenery, for which 

 she had all her life a deep appreciation. 



In the year 1841 Emma Diruff was married to Dr. Seiler, a young phy- 

 sician whose family like her own was one of the oldest and most aristo- 

 cratic in Bavaria. The estate of her husband, to which she at once re- 

 moved with him, was situated in Langenthal in Switzerland, not far from 



