Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 72.djvu/536

 was usually cold and calculating; and yet in some moments he could arouse, through his own deep earnestness, the highest enthusiasm among his students for the subject whereof he spoke—an enthusiasm, the fruits of which have been well shown by the works of the many students, afterwards famous, who received their first impetus from contact with Müller during his periods at Bonn and at Berlin.

In this regard, it is almost needless to say that Müller's position in Berlin resulted in a powerful influence over the younger natural scientists, especially in the northern part of Germany. His personality, as we have seen it, was one to attract students and to hold them when once they knew him well. He planned for them, and often accompanied them on many student trips throughout Germany and even into Norway and Sweden for the purpose of extending various phases of their biological study. In spite of his apparent coldness and constraint, he was, as DuBois Reymond has said, always a ready "comerade," and his views, his books, his apparatus of all kinds, were ever willingly shared with all who desired them.

To the same degree in which Müller was independent in his thought and work, he desired this quality in his students. In his relations with them, notwithstanding his thorough friendliness, it appears that in the laboratories Müller would seldom enter into an ordinary conversation. Regarding this point, DuBois Reymond says in his "Gedächtnissrede," "The greatest reward for us students was when Müller relaxed and spoke in common conversation along the lines of highest pleasantry." Even before his fame as a leader in the field of natural science had gone abroad, and while dependent upon his worth as a teacher alone, he had constantly at his side a circle of eager students who clung to him with enthusiasm. Gathered about him in the earlier days at the University of Bonn, before he went to Berlin, one finds such men as Claparède, Haeckel, Lachmann, Lieberkuhn, Anton Schneider and Max Schultze. Upon his departure to Berlin in 1833, many of his students of the Bonn period followed him, and one need only mention the names of Haeckel, Ludwig, Bischoff, Schultze, Volkmann, Brücke, Helmholtz, Virchow and DuBois Reymond, to indicate the immeasurable significance which, as a teacher and leader of the young investigators of that time, Müller must have exercised. The lines of work which he established, his disciples and followers have carried out, and to what extent, we all realize—not as royal inheritors of that vast sovereign power of their master, but, we may say, as governors over the smaller territories into which, like the empire of Alexander, the field of natural science became divided after the death of its last great ruler. Of this famous group of students, now Haeckel alone remains, DuBois Reymond having died in 1896. Yet all these men, at some period of their lives, have rendered grateful