NATURE 



193 



THURSDAY, JULY 2, 1903. 



THE BIOGRAPHY OF HELMHOLTZ. 

 Hermann von Helmholtz. By Leo Koenigsberger. 

 In three volumes. Vol. i. Pp xi + 375. Price 

 S marks. Vol. ii. Pp. xiv + 383. Price 10 marks. 

 Vol. iii. Pp. xi+142. Price 3 marks. (Bruns- 

 wick : Vieweg, 1903.) 



Education and Physiological Work. 



THE third and last volume of Koenigsberger 's bio- 

 graphy of the great natural philosopher has now- 

 appeared. The whole work is worthy of its subject; 

 the author made it his aim, as he tells us in his preface, 

 10 set forth Helmholtz's manifold and various achieve- 

 nunts as a discoverer in such a way as to render them 

 intelligible to all scientific readers. Helmholtz is best 

 known by his discoveries in experimental physics, but 

 during the first half dozen years after the completion 

 of his professional education, the business of his life 

 was that of an army surgeon. It was as an army 

 surgeon that he published, between 1842 and 1848, 

 those remarkable researches on fermentation, on the 

 nature of muscular contraction, and on the production 

 of heat therein, the results of which served as the 

 foundation for the building up of a new science of 

 physiology. Even the treatise on the " Erhaltung der 

 Kraft," or, as we now call it, the conservation of 

 energy, although mainly physical, exercised its chief 

 influence on physiologists. In natural philosophy the 

 principle set forth in it had been already recognised, 

 but had not as yet been presented to the physiological 

 student as a fundamental doctrine, or successfully 

 applied to the phenomena of life. 



The biography of a man of great intellectual pre- 

 eminence fulfils its highest purpose by enabling us to 

 ^ form a just estimate of the antecedent and surround- 

 5 ing influences which made him what he was. Herr 

 I Koenigsberger has treated his subject in such a way 

 , as to afford the information that the scientific. reader 

 f seeks. How can we account for the production of a 

 J man of such extraordinary endowments? Did Helm- 

 holtz owe his intellectual superiority to his innate 

 qualities, to his parentage, to his education, and if to 

 the latter, was it due to his teachers or to his con- 

 temporaries? Koenigsberger 's indications lead us to 

 believe that in each of these respects his life was in- 

 fluenced by circumstances exceptionally favourable to 

 his intellectual development. 



Nationally, Helmholtz was of mixed descent. It 

 may be assumed that his father was German, but his 

 mother w^as half English, half French. Her maiden 

 name, Caroline Penn, was derived from the great 

 Quaker of the seventeenth century, who himself was 

 the son of an almost equally distinguished English 

 admiral. On the female side she was of Huguenot 

 descent. 



There can, I think, be no doubt that the moral and 

 intellectual atmosphere of the Helmholtz home was 

 excellent. The little that we are told of his mother 

 indicates that she was a woman of great simplicity 

 of character, but at the same time of unusual intelli- 

 gence, who devoted herself heart and soul to pro- 

 NO. 1757, VOL. 68] 



moting the happiness of her husband and children. 

 His father was at the head of the Gymnasium at Pots- 

 dam, a position which he had attained after many 

 years of arduous struggle with adverse circumstances. 

 He appears to have been an enthusiastic teacher, who 

 made it his aim rather to evoke in his pupils a love 

 for the classical writers than to drill them in gram- 

 matical niceties. 



Of Helmholtz's childhood we are told that, although 

 his mother recognised in her firstborn " Geist und 

 Verstand," there was no other indication of infantile 

 precocity. At nine he entered the lowest class in the 

 Gymnasium, but in a year was half-way up the school. 

 His progress, however, was retarded by the difficulty 

 which he had in learning anything by heart. During 

 his first three years he went through the regular 

 classical work of the school, but he appears even at 

 this early age (ten to thirteen) to have done much 

 extra work under his father's direction, who en- 

 couraged him to extend his studies beyond the limits 

 of the school course. At thirteen he began the study 

 of mathematics under a teacher who appears to have 

 had as great a faculty for exciting enthusiasm for 

 work in natural science as the father had in literature. 

 Helmholtz continued his classical work, but became 

 more and more engrossed by his studies in mathe- 

 matics and physics, the subjects which, he says In his 

 " Abiturientenvita," " omnium disciplinarum maxime 

 a pueritia me delectavit," so much so that when the 

 rest were engaged in construing, he " beguiled the 

 tedious hour " by working problems " under the 

 table." By the time he was fifteen, he had already 

 made up his mind to devote his life to natural science. 



His father's means were so limited that the only 

 way in which this desire could be gratified was by 

 taking the study of medicine "into the bargain." 

 He therefore at sixteen, while still a " gymnasiast,"^ 

 became a pupil in the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Institut at 

 Berlin (the Pepiniere) for the training of army medical 

 officers. Two years later (at eighteen) he passed the 

 Abiturienten-Examen, showing " comprehensive and 

 thorough knowledge in the elements of mathematics, 

 and physics." He obtained at the same time distinc- 

 tion in classics, exhibited a good knowledge of French^ 

 English, and Italian, and had made sufficient progress 

 in Hebrew to be able to offer that language as an extra 

 subject. It was thus that he was equipped for the busi- 

 ness of his life. That he possessed extraordinary natural 

 endowments cannot be questioned, but it is no less 

 certain that he owed the early maturity of his intellect 

 and his exceptional heuristic power to an almost per- 

 fect education. 



Whatever be the place among contemporary 

 physicists to which his achievements entitled him, it 

 can scarcely be questioned that as a physiologist he 

 was primus inter pares. He was the first to under- 

 stand what is meant by the well-known definition of 

 life as " organism in action," and thus to distinguish 

 clearly between that branch of the science of life which 

 deals with organism and that which relates to the 

 chemical and physical processes by which its action 

 manifests itself. In the former Helmholtz did not 

 much interest himself, and consequently was not, in 

 the modern sense of the word, a biologist. His aim 



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