Frans Cornelis Donders, 1818-1889 : with a portrait from an unfinished work of G.F. Watts.

  • Bowman, William, Sir, 1816-1892.
Date:
1891
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Frans Cornelis Donders, 1818-1889 : with a portrait from an unfinished work of G.F. Watts. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    musical and artistic temperament, responsive to every refined emotion, his quick perception and ready memory, his geniality and conversa- tional powers, made his handsome presence everywhere acceptable.* Bonders was then, writes Moleschott with fervid admiration, a swelling rose-bud, whose calix leaves signified nothing but pure science, the flower leaves hidden glory. In one word, he was a man complete—perfect for his time of life. His bright intelligence, indeed, was able to assimilate without apparent effort all that it saw and read of in the active world around—a world then agitated by novel questions, of absorbing interest, regarding the Constitution of the Universe and the true import of Man's place and being in it. In those days very recent advances in the methods and aims of exact research, as applied to various branches of science, had made it possible to penetrate more deeply than ever before into many of the profounder mysteries of nature, and some grand enlightenment seemed near at hand. During the years following IS-iO, one concep- tion in particular, that of the Conservation of Energy in Nature, long foreshadowed, was rapidly assuming definite shape under the ordeal of exact experiment pursued on many converging lines. It could hardly, however, have been said to have become yet established, even in the minds of the most advanced physicists, ere Bonders had clearly recognised its far-reaching importance in its special application to the Science of Life, the foundations of which his keen gaze was then freshly exploring. In the winter of 1844, when but twenty-six, in only a lecture, not pretending, he modestly says, to any high scientific worth, he casts a glance on the change of matter as the source of animal heat.f Here we already find him embracing in his view all nature, and looking confidently to her most general and all- pervading laws for the explanation of the enigma of life. Animal heat is chemical heat; but the final and irreversible proof of this, he shows in detail, can only be given when science shall have proved that the quantity of heat in the animal body answers absolutely to the chemical change which takes place there. All working in nature, all life on earth, rests on the change of the elements from which it is formed, but side by side with this change of matter stands a change of forces. Both are inseparably bound up together. As the change of matter is the condition withoiit which no life exists, so the change of forces is the condition without which no life gives evidence of itself. An idea arises gradually in science, which finds confirmation everywhere, absolute contradiction nowhere, an idea * His stature was 6 feet 1 inch ; circumference of head, 24 inches, English. t A Q-lance on the Change of Matter of Epitellurian Life as the Source of Proper Heat of Plants and Animals, by Dr. Bonders, Military Doctor, 2nd Class, at the Military School of Medicine, delivered in the Society of Sciences, Utrecht; Van der Post, Feb. 1845. [In Dutcli, never translated.]