December 6, 1894J 



NA TURE 



on the foreign list are Henri Ernest Baillon, Henri Poincate, 

 and Eduard Suess. During the year,;the Society lost eighteen 

 F'ellows and three Foreign Members. 



H.R.H. Louis Phillippe d'Orleans, Count of Paris, Septem- 

 ber 8, 1S94, aged 56. 



John Tyndall, December 4, 1S93, aged 73. 



The Earl of Lovelace, December 29, 1893, aged 89. 



Sir Samuel White Baker, December 30, 1S93, aged 72. 



Arthur Milnes Marshall, December 31, 1893, aged 41. 



Pierre J. Van Beneden, January 8, 1S94, aged 93. 



William Pengelly, March 16, 1S94, aged 82. 



Lord Hannen, March 29, 1894, aged 73. 



Dr. Charles Edouard Brown-Sequard. April I, 1894, aged 77. 



Lord Bowen, April 10, 1S94, aged 58. 



Biian Houghton Hodgson, May 23, 1894, aged 94. 



George John Romanes, May 23, 1S94, aged 46. 



Lord Coleridge, June 5, 1S94, aged 74. 



Charles R. Alder Wright, July 25, 1894, aged 50. 



Rev. William Bentinck Latham Hawkins, August 31, 1894, 

 aged 83. 



Admiral Sir Edward Augustus Inglefield, September 5, 1894, 

 aged 74. 



Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz, September 8, 

 1894, aged 73. 



Jean Charles Galissard de Marignac, September 15, 1S94, 

 aged 77. 



William Topley, October 2, 1894, aged 53. 



Lord Basing, October 22, 1894, aged 68. 



Colonel R. Y. Armstrong, November I, 1S94, aged 55. 



Lord Kelvin, the President, then delivered the Anniversary 

 Address as follows : — 



Science has lost severely during the past year. In the list of 

 Fellows deceased, which I have read to you, you have heard the 

 names of Tyndall, Milnes Marshall, \'an Beneden, Pengelly, 

 Brown-Sequard, Romanes, Alder Wright, Helmholtz, Marignac, 

 Topley, all well known to you as having been in their lives 

 zealous and successful scientific investigators, who have largely 

 contributed to the object for which the Royal Society works, 

 "The Increase of Natural Knowledge." Tyndall, full of fire 

 and enthusiasm in solid experimental work advancing the 

 boundaries of science, contributed largely, by his brilliant 

 lectures and books, to make science popular, as it now is in 

 England and America. By the sad death of Milnes Marshall 

 on .Scawfell, in Cumberland, on the last day of 1S93, we lost a 

 young, able, and enthusiastic worker in zoology. A few 

 months later, we lost the veteran Pengelly, who did so much 

 for geological science, and gave such delightful and valuable 

 lessons to the larger world of not scientific geologists, in what 

 he did in his exploration of Kent's Cavern, Torquay. 

 Romanes, full of zeal, fighting to the end with the most 

 difficult problems that have ever occupied the mind of man, and 

 devoting his health and his wealth to promote not merely 

 philosophical speculation but also the experimental research by 

 which alone philosophy can have a foundation, left us at the 

 early age of forty-six. 



A year ago, in my anniversary address, I called your attention 

 to Hertz's experimental demonstration of electric waves, which 

 he found in workmg out an expeiimental problem originally pro- 

 posed by Helmholtz to him when he was engaged in experimental 

 researches in the Physical Institute of Berlin in 1879. An 

 English translation by Jones, of Hertz's book describing his 

 work on electric waves, dedicated "with gratitude" to 

 Helmholtz, was published in England and America in 

 December 1893. On the first day of the new year the disciple 

 died, and within the year the master fallowed him. Of the 

 whole of Helmholtz's great and splendid work in physiology, 

 physics, and mathematics, I doubt whether any one man may be 

 qualified to speak with the power which knowledge and 

 understanding can give : but we can all appreciate, to some 

 degree, the vast services which he has rendered to biology by 

 the application of his mathematical genius and highly trained 

 capacity for expeiimental research to physiological investigation. 



In his interesting autobiographical sketch he tells us that his 

 early natural inclination was for physics, which he found more 

 attractive than purely geometrical and algebraic studies ; but his 

 father could only give him the opportunity of studying physics 

 by his learning medicine to earn a livelihood, and he himself was 

 by no means averse to thus entering on the study of living matter 

 instead of confining himself to the physics of dead matter. 1 



NO. 1 3 10, VOL. 51] 



think we may now feel that the world has gained largely by this 

 early necessity for a young man of great genius and power to 

 I choose a practical profession. 



j One early result was his careful examination, while still a 

 I student, of the theory of animal heat, and a little later (1847) 

 ' his great essay, " Ueber die Erhaltung der Kraft," Conserva- 

 Mion of Energy as we now call it, communicated to the 

 Society of Berlin on July, 3 1847, of which he said in 1891, 

 " My aim was merely to give a critical investigation and 

 arrangement of the facts for the benefit of physiologists." As 

 a student he had found that Stahi's theory, ascribing to every 

 living body the possession of the property of "The Perpetual 

 Motion " as an essence of its "vital force," was still held by 

 most physiologi>tf." His essay on the "Conservation of 

 Energy," giving strong reasons for rejecting that theory, though 

 looked upon, at first, by many of the physical and philosophical 

 authorities of the time as a fantastic speculation, was enthusi- 

 astically welcomed by younger student philosophers, and must 

 soon have convinced the elder men that, whatever may be the 

 real efficiency of vitality, vast and wonderful as it is, it does not 

 include the performance of work without drawing upon a source 

 of energy. This conclusion had been virtually foreseen before 

 the end of last century by Rumford and Davy, and had been 

 clearly stated and powerfully supported by Joule and Mayer a 

 few years before Helmholtz found it for himself and successfully 

 persuaded others of its truth. 



It is interesting for us now to know that, while thus con- 

 tributing so effectively to the abandonment of the old doctrine 

 that vital "force" can work without drawing on an external 

 source of energy, Helmholtz was even more effectively con- 

 cerned in the establishment of a new doctrine which has given 

 a vast extension to the province of life previously perhaps 

 undreamt of, but now universally recognised as thoroughly 

 well established, and supremely important in modern physiology 

 and medicine. On recovering from a typhus fever in the 

 autumn of 1841, at the age of twenty, the last year of his under- 

 graduate course in the Army Medical School of the Friederich 

 Wilhelm's Institute, he spent the accumulations of his income, 

 which free treatment at the hospital during his illness had left 

 him, in the purchase of a microscope, an instrument then but 

 little used in medical education. He began immediately to 

 use it, and made some important observations on the ganglion 

 cells of invertebrates, which, at the suggestion of his 

 master, Johannes Miiller, he took as the subject of his 

 inaugural thesis for the doctor's degree, in November 1842, and 

 which was his first published work.' With the same micro- 

 scope, he observed vibrios in putrefying liquids, which he 

 described in his second published paper (1S43), "On the 

 Nature of Putrefaction and Fermentation. " His distinguished 

 comrade, Schwann, in the laboratory of Johannes .Muller, had 

 already shown that vegetable cells are present in fermenting 

 solutions of sugar, and that air, which had been highly heated, 

 was incapable of exciting the fermentation which the access of 

 ordinary atmospheric air was known to produce. Helmholtz 

 found that oxygen, yielded by the decomposition of water in 

 flasks containing small pieces of boiled meat, did not produce 

 putrefaction. 'Thus the doctrine, held perhaps by all before 

 them, and certainly supported by the great Liebig, that putre- 

 faction and fermentation are purely chemical processes of erema- 

 causis (or slow combustion), produced by oxygen, was thoroughly 

 disproved by the two young investigators. But Helmholtz went 

 farther, and showed almost certainly that the actual presence of 

 a living creature, vibrio, as he called it, bacterium, as we more 

 commonly call it now, is necessary for either fermentation or 

 putrefaction. He proved by experiment that a partition of 

 moist bladder, between the yeast and the fermentable liquid, pre- 

 j vented the entrance of the vibrios which he had observed, una 

 pievcitlcd I'm fermentaticiti. It had been reasonably suggested 

 that fermentation or putrefaction might be a purely chemical 

 process produced by a quasi-chemical agent or poison secreted 

 I by a living organism ; but Helmholtz's observation disproved 

 I this supposition almost certainly, because any .^uch chemical 

 substance in solution would pass by diffusion through the 

 bladder, and produce its effect without any direct action of the 

 living creatures. Although Helmholtz himself was character- 

 istically philosophical and conscientious in not claiming, as 

 absolutely proved, what he had only rendered probable, it is 

 certain that this early work of his on putrefaction and fermenta- 

 tion constituted a very long step towards the great generalisa- 

 ' Helmholtz's " Wissenschaftliche .A^handlungen," vol.-il. p. 663 



