NATURE 



169 



THURSDAY, JUNE 21, 1900. 



THE REMINISCENCES OF A VETERAN OF 

 SCIENCE. 



Erinnerufjo^en aus meinetn Lebett. By A. Kolliker. 

 Pp. x + 399 ; with 7 plates, 10 text figures, and portrait 

 of the author. (Leipzig : W. Engelmann, 1899.) 



THE memoirs of the venerable Professor of Anatomy 

 at VViirzburg will interest a wide circle of readers 

 in this country, whether amongst the older generation 

 of scientific men, whose privilege it has been to know the 

 author as a genial friend and colleague, or amongst the 

 juniors in rank and years, to whom the name of Kolliker 

 has been one which from their youth upwards they have 

 learnt to respect as that of a great leader in scientific 

 thought and discovery. Many of the latter class may, 

 perhaps, learn from this book, for the first time, how 

 much modern zoology owes to its author. So rapid has 

 been the advance of biological science in the latter half 

 of the nineteenth century, and so great is the interval, 

 judged not by time, but by the progress of knowledge, 

 which separates the science of to-day from that of fifty 

 years ago, that there is always considerable danger of 

 the merits of those who have grown grey in the ranks of 

 science being overlooked or msufficiently realised by the 

 younger generation. Students are taught at an early stage 

 in their career facts or principles which seem so well 

 established or even self-evident, m the light of currefit 

 knowledge, that it is quite an awakening to find that the 

 man who first enunciated them is still living in our midst. 

 To give one instance, a student of zoology is taught 

 probably in the very first lecture he attends, the distinc- 

 tion between Protozoa and Metazoa based upon the 

 essentially unicellular nature of the individual in the 

 former sub-kingdom. If he reflects at all on the matter, 

 a truth so obvious and so easily demonstrated will seem 

 to him one which has been recognised by mankind per- 

 haps from a remote antiquity. Yet it was Kolliker who 

 first, in 1845, pointed out the existence of unicellular 

 animals, and brought forward the Gregarines as instances, 

 and who later, in conjunction with von Siebold, ex- 

 pressed the opinion that all the Infusoria, with the 

 exception of such forms as the Rotifers, consisted of 

 single cells. In a further work upon Actinophrys this 

 conclusion was extended to the Rhizopods, and so a 

 great generalisation was established, the truth of which 

 is now never called in dispute. 



Quite apart, however, from the great interest which 

 these memoirs possess from the scientific point of view, 

 their appearance at the present time is welcome for 

 other reasons. At a period of strained political relations, 

 when our country appears isolated in aims and sym- 

 pathies from the rest of Europe, when international anti- 

 pathies and prejudices seem in a fair way to spread from 

 the official to the personal sphere, it is a refreshing 

 change to read the narrative of one who was a frequent 

 and a welcome visitor in our midst. To judge, at least 

 from the prevailing tone of this book, its author is no 

 *' Britenfresser." He refers constantly with warmth, we 

 might say with affection, to the hospitality of his many 

 friends in this country and to the pleasant times he spent 

 NO. 1599, VOL. 62] 



in their homes, feelings which, we can be sure, were as 

 warmly reciprocated by those about whom he writes. 



The book is divided into two parts, the one personal, 

 the other scientific. Part i. contains a general account of 

 his life, with details of his many scientific and other 

 journeys, and a brief account of his relations to various 

 learned societies. Part ii. may be described as a cata- 

 logue raisonnee of his works, and is a marvellous record 

 of many-sided scientific activity. His publications, 

 amounting to nearly 250 memoirs, are arranged under 

 the headings of histology, anatomy, physiology, embry- 

 ology, evolution, comparative anatomy and zoology, and 

 other miscellaneous items. Under each subdivision is 

 given a historical account of his work, its main results, 

 the ideas which guided him, and the conclusions which 

 he upheld. Here much will be found of great value to 

 the student — using the word in its widest sense — which 

 cannot be dealt with adequately within the limits of a 

 brief review. We turn, therefore, with greater interest to 

 the personal narrative set forth in Part i. 



Rudolf Albert Kolliker was born at Zurich on July 6, 

 1817. His boyhood and schooldays were passed in his 

 native town, and he was intended at first for a business 

 career, but, fortunately for science, this idea was given 

 up, and he entered Ziirich University, in 1836, as a 

 medical student. At the University his attention was 

 first given to botany, a subject in which he had as fellow- 

 student his intimate friend, Carl Nageli, and his first 

 publication (1839) was a list of the phanerogams of 

 Ziirich. Besides other medical and scientific courses he 

 attended the stimulating lectures of Oken on zoology and 

 nature-philosophy. In 1839 he spent a semester at Bonn, 

 and attended lectures on surgery and kindred subjects 

 which were still delivered in Latin. He next went to 

 Berlin for three semesters, from 1839 to 1841, a period 

 which he describes as a turning-point in his life, since 

 here he came under the influence of two great masters, 

 whose courses he attended— namely, Johannes Miiller 

 and Jakob Henle. Of the former, he writes : " the com- 

 prehensive outlook by which he connected forms widely 

 separated, and showed what they had in common, was 

 especially stimulating and, for me, new." From Henle 

 on the other hand, he received his first introduction to 

 the cell-theory of Schwann, and his attention was directed 

 to the structure of the animal body in a number of 

 lectures and demonstrations which he describes with 

 enthusiasm :— 



"Now when the youngest medical student is ac- 

 quainted with all this and much more from pictures of 

 all kinds, and the facts concerning the minutest structure 

 of the body are in every one's mouth even at school, it 

 is not easy to realise the impression made upon the 

 student at that time by the first sight of a drop of 

 blood, a ciliated lining, a section of bone or a striped 

 muscle fibre, and the impress of these experiences remains 

 permanently in the memory." 



Besides Miiller and Henle, he attended many other emi- 

 nent teachers at Berlin, including Ehrenberg and Remak. 

 From the latter he received his first demonstrations of the 

 embryology of the chick. In spite, however, of his ardent 

 medical and scientific pursuits, he found time to attend 

 lectures on ethics and Hegelian philosophy. It was 

 a result doubtless of Henle's influence that his first 



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