218 



SCIENCK 



[N. S. Vol. V. No. 110. 



Ludwig ; and now du Bois-Eeymond, last 

 but not least, has passed away. These four 

 eminent men who made everlasting marks 

 in science have been life-long friends. All 

 four were pupils of that grand master 

 Johannes Miiller. All four started out on 

 their phenomenal scientific careers in the 

 beginning of the forties and, though each 

 one worked in a different line of research, 

 they all had one object in common, which 

 was paramount to them, and that was the 

 liberation of the biological sciences from 

 the deadening grasp of the obscure natural 

 philosophy of those days, and the building 

 up of physiology on a scientific rational 

 basis. In combating the paralyzing idea 

 of a ' vital force,' none was as energetic, 

 none as perseverant as du Bois-Eeymond. 

 Only recently the old warrior in service of 

 rational science again entered the arena 

 to fight the old enemy in disguise, the 

 ' neovitalism ' of a Bunge, a Eindfleisch 

 and others. Du Bois-Eeymond and the 

 other great physiologists are no more, and 

 there is at present no one to fill their 

 places. Who will protect physiology against 

 the onward course of these new ' vital forces.' 

 E. du Bois-Eeymond was born on Novem- 

 ber 7, 1818, in Berlin. He received there 

 his general education at the College Fran- 

 gais, and in 1837 he entered the University 

 of Berlin, where he registered at first in the 

 philosophical faculty, attending various lec- 

 tures on philosophy, history and even the- 

 ology. An accidental attendance at one of 

 the lectures of Mitscherlich on experimental 

 chemistry, however, had a deciding influ- 

 ence upon du Bois-Eeymond's future. He 

 began to study mathematics and the natural 

 sciences, and went over later to the study 

 of medicine, thus coming in contact with 

 Johannes Miiller, who was at that time the 

 professor of physiology and anatomy at the 

 University of Berlin. Du Bois-Eeymond 

 became first the ' famulus,' and later on the 

 assistant, of Johannes Miiller. In 1846 he 



established himself as ' privat- decent ' at 

 the University, and in 1855 he was made 

 'professor extraordinarius.' In 1858, after 

 Miiller's death, the chair of physiology was 

 separated from that of anatomy,and du Bois- 

 Eeymond was made professor of physiology 

 and director of the physiological laboratory 

 in the University of Berlin, a position which 

 he held to the last day of his life. In 1851, 

 at the proposition of Alexander von Hum- 

 boldt and Johannes Miiller, du Bois-Eey- 

 mond was elected to the Berliner Academie 

 der Wissenschafi, a very high honor for a 

 young man of only 33 years, and since 1867 

 he was the permanent secretary of the acad- 

 emy. Du Bois-Eeymond was an honorary 

 member of numerous scientific societies all 

 over the Old and the N"ew "World. 



The brilliant scientific carer of du Bois- 

 Eeymond was again determined by a single 

 accident. In 1841 Johannes Miiller handed 

 to his amanuensis Matteucci's paper (Essai 

 sur les phenomenes electriques des Ani- 

 maux, Paris, 1841) for the verification of the 

 experiments on the so-called frog current of 

 Nobili. It became the task of du Bois- 

 Eeymond's life, and he solved it by creating 

 a new science, the science of animal elec- 

 tricity. Already, a year later, appeared his 

 first short paper on this subject (Ueber den 

 sogenannten Froschstrom und die electro- 

 motorischen Fische, Poggendorff's Analen 

 der Physik, Vol. 58), and was followed by 

 his thesis (Quse apud veteres de piscibus 

 electricis extant argumenta, 1843). Then 

 years of silence followed, years of hard 

 labor, of seclusion in his small private lab- 

 oratory, where 'the frog and the multiplicator 

 were the whole world ' to that most ener- 

 getic of all investigators. The problems, 

 the methods, the instruments, were thor- 

 oughly worked out with unparalled energy ,^ 

 ingenuity, precision and self-criticism, be- 

 fore they were communicated to the world. 

 But then, when his book on animal electricity 

 came out, it was a revelation, it marked an 



