Frans Cornelis Donders, 1818-1889.

Date:
1891
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Frans Cornelis Donders, 1818-1889. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    even the humblest, followed him with grateful recognition when he appeared at the stations or moved among them. Indeed, his life was one of incessant labour and benevolent endeavour to turn to useful ends each new insight into nature which he and others were acquiring. Sympathising with all, seeming to understand the sentiments and interests of all, he was generous as well as just in his judgment of others, yet ever courageous and firm in the assertion of whatever he deemed to be right and true. Indefatigable in the pursuit of truth, he was as able in imparting it. Eloquence, the graces of style, and the mastery of several languages combined to make him a great teacher. Even in his youth he had become conscious that to teach was to learn, and that to learn was the purest of intellectual enjoyments. “ I was already in correspondence with Donders,” says von Helm¬ holtz, in a letter to the present writer, “ before 1856, when I lived in Konigsberg. He had sent me his physiological treatise on Animal Heat and his handbook on Physiology, and as I had then made the first experiments on the change of form of the crystalline lens in accommodation, he told me about the somewhat earlier experiments made by Cramer in his laboratory. As far as I know, I first made his personal acquaintance during my stay at Bonn, between 1856 and 1859. He used to go in summer, with his then already ailing wife, to Cleve, to breathe purer air in that hilly country, as was then the fashion in Holland. From thence he came over to Bonn. I have also paid him a visit of a few days, in Utrecht, at that time, and lived in his house. . . . The loveableness, openness, and honesty of his character you know—I need not portray them to you. We have then and afterwards discoursed very much on scientific questions, as we many times and independently had taken the same problems in hand. He had, in Ophthalmology, the greater experience of patients, and I have learnt much from him in that respect; but even where it seemed to me that I must maintain my own opinion, I never observed in him the least sign of sensitiveness, or of too great warmth in defending his position. In his way of talking he had then already, as a young man, something of stateliness; he loved choice expressions, remind¬ ing one somewhat of the antique eloquence of the French Academy. But he was never prolix, indeed, rather concentrated, in his conversa¬ tion, and I have always loved to listen to him, though in Germany we are very little accustomed to attend much to the artistic oratorical element in speaking. He -was clearly a warm-hearted man with great ideal views, and he thought it his duty to give utterance to these ideal views before the world, and to show them in their height and significance. Moreover, he was aware of his capacity of im¬ pressing this with great force upon his auditory. Very beautiful in this respect was his last speech in handing over the Graefe Medal at
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