Very similar in natural gifts though Huxley and Hoppe-Seyler were, the different environments under which they were placed determined their development in radically different paths. Huxley, though possessing a strong natural tendency toward physiology, was forced to become an anatomist, and from a very early date his great controversial powers were called into such requisition that his name became almost a household word among the English peoples. Hoppe-Seyler, on the other hand, while still very young, was given a decided impetus toward the study of the chemistry of organism, and, as a pioneer in a new science, was little known outside the immediate circle of his personal friends and scientific colaborers.
Felix Hoppe-Seyler deserves to be remembered by mankind not only for the valuable contributions he made to our knowledge of the chemical processes of life, not only for the impetus he gave to the development of a new science, physiological chemistry, but also for the influence he exerted on the minds of his pupils and colaborers. Great investigator though he was, and lasting though his influence on the development of biochemistry will be, he probably served mankind best in his capacity as a teacher. As there has not appeared in any English or American journal a just account of the value of the life and work of this illustrious man, a brief sketch of one to whom the world in the future will probably consider itself indebted, not less indeed than to Jenner, Pasteur, Koch, and Lister, may be of interest, and some recognition, insufficient though it be, of his lifelong services.
Ernst Felix Immanuel Hoppe, better known as Felix Hoppe-Seyler, was born in Freiburg in Thuringen, on the 26th of December, 1825, and died suddenly of heart disease at his summer home on Lake Constance on the 10th of August, 1895. He was the tenth child of the Pastor Ernst Hoppe and Frederike Nitzsch. He came of a long line of school teachers and ministers. His mother died when he was six years old, and his father three years later. The lad received a temporary home with his brother-in-law. Dr. Seyler, but soon entered the orphan asylum at Halle, where he attended the gymnasium.
His stay in Halle exerted a great influence on his later life, for the régime at the institution which was his home was of Spartan-like simplicity and rigidity. He came under the influence here, also, of the old apothecary of the institution, who took great delight in introducing young Hoppe to the mysteries of chemistry, in which he soon acquired considerable proficiency. He was dismissed from the gymnasium as a diligent student in 1846, with a preference for the natural sciences and mathematics, and in the autumn of the same year was matriculated in the medical faculty of the University
