1. 



Annual Report of the Council. 



often extremely complicated, characterised by extreme deli- 

 cacy and precision. And if other hands than those of 

 Du Bois-Reymond have added to these some finishing 

 touches, to him belongs the credit of having brought them 

 first into general use. 



The outcome of his long continued labours consists on the 

 one hand in the determination of facts in the enunciation of 

 the principal laws according to which living beings develop 

 electric currents, and on the other hand in the construction 

 of a theory to account for the facts and explain the laws. 

 Of the former part of his labours, very much indeed remains 

 as a permanent addition to science. The latter part has not 

 been so fortunate. Du Bois-Reymond was led to believe in 

 the existence of electrical molecules as an essential and 

 integral part of living tissues, and to attribute the develop- 

 ment of electric currents to these. Other observers, among, 

 whom L. Hermann, himself a pupil of Du Bois-Reymond, 

 is prominent, explain the existence of the currents as due ;to 

 the changes, the chemical changes, necessarily taking-place 

 whenever a tissue enters in a state of activity. And though 

 the older views have still their supporters, the conceptions of 

 Hermann are those which have gained the greater adhesion 

 among physiologists. But even the strongest partisans of 

 the school of Hermann fully admit that Du Bois-Reymond 

 is virtually the founder of this particular branch of science. 



Though Du Bois-Reymond attacked problems in physi- 

 ology other than those of electricity, yet his main work lay 

 in these. He published his collected papers as " Gesammelte 

 Abhandlungen " in 1875-7. His usefulness in the world, 

 however, was not limited to these various specific and 

 technical inquiries. At Berlin he became a man of power, 

 anpl did much to raise and maintain the high reputation in 

 which science is held in the German kingdom and empire. 

 During the latter years of his life he and Helmholtz were 

 conspicuous personages in German society. His influence 

 was due not alone to his original inquiries, but also to his 

 varied and many public utterances on scientific and other 



