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Updated: June 9, 2025
Curious experience with a member of the Chinese Legation at a court reception. Sundry German public men. My relations with professors at the Berlin University. Lepsius, Curtius, Gneist, Von Sybel, Droysen. Hermann Grimm and his wife. Treitschke. Statements of Du Bois-Reymond regarding the expulsion of the Huguenots from France. Helmholtz and Hoffmann; a Scotch experience of the latter.
Haeckel’s facile method of constructing genealogical trees, which ignores difficulties and discrepant facts, has met with much criticism and ridicule even among Darwinians. The “orator of Berlin,” Du Bois-Reymond, declared that if he must read romances he would prefer to read them in some other form than that of genealogical trees.
Wherever he was, he had with him a block of paper leaves and a pencil, by means of which he carried on conversation; in parliament he always had at his side a shorthand-writer who took down the debates for him. Some of the most interesting information which I received regarding historical and current matters in Berlin was from the biologist Du Bois-Reymond.
Other experiments performed soon afterwards by Helmholtz himself, and by various followers, chief among whom was Du Bois-Reymond, modified somewhat the exact figures at first obtained, but did not change the general bearings of the early results.
Warnings of this kind have come occasionally from Du Bois-Reymond, but the true type of this group, and its mode of thought, is Virchow. It will repay us and suffice us to make acquaintance with it through him. His opposition to Darwinism and the theory of descent was directed at its most salient point: the descent of man from the apes.
It is chiefly on this that the dualistic view of the world founds its assertion, that man is an altogether peculiar being, and that his personal soul is immortal; and this is the reason why the "Leipsic ignorabimus-speech" of Du Bois-Reymond has for twenty years been prized as a defence by all representatives of the mythological view of the world, and extolled as a refutation of "monistic dogma."
And Du Bois-Reymond: "We can imagine the knowledge of nature arrived at a point where the universal process of the world might be represented by a single mathematical formula, by one immense system of simultaneous differential equations, from which could be deduced, for each moment, the position, direction, and velocity of every atom of the world."
That conviction had taken him as medical officer to Egypt and India, where, amid the relics of civilisations half as old as time, he found traditions of a great scientific practice; and thence it had brought him back to study such foreign medical writers as Du Bois-Reymond, Nobili, Matteucci, and Müller, and to observe the method of the famous physicians of the Salpétrière.
Gone was the old Emperor William, gone also was the Emperor Frederick, and Bismarck and Moltke and a host of others who had given dignity and interest to the great assemblages at the capital. Gone, too, from the university were Lepsius, Helmholtz, Curtius, Hoffmann, Gneist, Du Bois-Reymond, and Treitschke, all of whom, in the old days, had been my guests and friends.
Johannes Müller, the founder of modern physiology in Germany, declared himself against it, and his influence long prevailed; Valentin, Rudolf Wagner, and Emil du Bois-Reymond were on the same side. On the other hand various eminent gynæcologists Litzmann, Roth, Hennig, etc. have argued in favor of the reality of maternal impressions.
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