HERMANN VON HELMHOLTZ 



Have all the resources and all the means which 

 science has accumulated become exhausted ? ' l 



About this time there was a distinguished band of 

 youthful students at the University of Berlin, who all 

 ultimately became men of scientific eminence, and 

 who made their mark on the learning of the follow- 

 ing thirty or forty years. Here Helmholtz met Du 

 Bois Reymond (a friend of his school days), who 

 afterwards became Professor of Physiology in the Uni- 

 versity of Berlin, and who systematised and developed 

 the department of electro-physiology ; Briicke, who 

 in due time was elected to the Chair of Physiology in 

 Vienna ; Virchow, the greatest of living pathologists, 

 who still holds the Chair of Pathology in Berlin, while 

 he is a power in science and also in the state ; and 

 many others. These all clustered round the feet of 

 the greatest physiologist of the time, Johannes Miiller, 

 who taught anatomy and physiology in the university. 

 It so happened also that Gustav Magnus filled the 

 Chair of Physics. These two distinguished men 

 represented a new school of thought, then arising in 

 Germany, that which rebelled against the older 

 metaphysical school, and craved for the investigation 

 of natural phenomena. They attracted many dis- 

 ciples, and an alliance was established between the 

 physicists and chemists on the one hand, and the 

 physiologists on the other. Thus Gustav Karsten, 

 Heintz, Knoblauch, Clausius, Kirchhoff, Quincke, 



1 Popular Lectures, op. cit. } p. 203. 

 IO 



