Hoppe-Seyler should be gratefully remembered by posterity for his service in thus putting on its feet and starting in motion a science the future of which man can but guess at, but which is perhaps fuller of promise for the alleviation of suffering, for the betterment of the conditions of existence of mankind, than any other science or group of sciences, for it holds somewhere within it the keys of the riddles of life, disease, decay, and death.
In no one way did Hoppe-Seyler set the science further forward than in the founding of a journal, the Zeitschrift für physiologische Chemie, devoted exclusively to biochemistry. The journal received at the outset both hearty support and hearty opposition, but it still remains as the official organ of publication of biochemical works. Previous to the establishment of this paper, works treating of the chemistry of organisms were scattered in agricultural, chemical, physiological, pathological, and medical journals, just as they are in the English language to-day. They thus lost largely in effectiveness. Hoppe-Seyler brought all biochemical efforts to a focus, with admirable result.
Hoppe-Seyler as a teacher could be known only by his immediate pupils. Baumann and Kossel have written of him that "with untiring patience he introduced the beginner to practical chemistry; no ignorance, no lack of skill exhausted his forbearance." He may be judged, however, by us through the men who were his pupils. 'Ro test of a man's mind is more certain than the influence he exerts upon those who associate with him, particularly his pupils. Judged by this test Hoppe-Seyler must rank very high indeed. Whether it is that a man of his type naturally attracts to him the most promising of the rising generation, or whether even an ordinary man absorbs from such a teacher an amount of light which, like a fluorescing substance, he is enabled thereafter to emit, certain it is that HoppeSeyler's pupils include an extraordinary number of men of ability. His pupils and his pupils' pupils are the principal workers in physiological chemistry to-day, and a mere enumeration of their achievements would be a history of the development of the science in the last forty years.
As a teacher Hoppe-Seyler strongly resembled Ludwig, his great contemporary physiologist. Brooks, of Johns Hopkins, Agassiz, and Liebig, the chemist. He offers a striking contrast in this respect to Claude Bernard, whose great genius affected the science of physiology principally by its own extraordinarily keen and suggestive researches, and when it died left no heirs.
Such was Hoppe-Seyler—a winning personality, a courageous upholder of what he believed true, a keen investigator, a far-sighted, broad-minded, kind-hearted man.
