HERMANN VON HELMHOLTZ 



also the children of good fortune. They came on the 

 world's stage at the right time, they caught up all the 

 impressions of the science of their day, they added to 

 this the product of their own labours, and thus they 

 gave a new impetus to scientific progress. 



The career of Helmholtz illustrates what has been 

 written. To understand in some measure how he 

 contributed so much to the science of his day, we 

 must not only recognise his transcendent genius, but 

 also that the times were favourable to its full develop- 

 ment. 



During the eighteenth and the beginning of the 

 nineteenth century, science made little progress in 

 Germany. I In chemistry the phlogiston theory led 

 men in the wrong direction for nearly a century. The 

 problems of physical science were still approached by 

 the a priori method, and the speculations of Schelling 

 and Hegel were not favourable to any method that 

 had for its foundation the investigation of facts. Here 

 and there important scientific results were obtained, 

 such as Chladni's study of elastic vibrations of plates, 

 Ritter's electrical experiments, and Seebeck's discovery 

 of thermo-electricity, but there was no co-operation 

 among the physicists, and there was no common goal 

 towards which their energies were directed. 



Physiology had not yet asserted her existence as a 

 science founded on observation and experiment. She 



1 G. Wiedemann, Introduction to Helmholtz's Wiuenschaftlicht 

 Abhandlungtn. Leipzig, 1895. 



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