MAYER, JULIUS ROBERT. - B. at Heilbronn (Germany) on 25 Nov. 1814, d. there on 20 March 1878.
In 1840 he embarked as a ship’s doctor in the service of Holland. In Java, reflecting on body temperature and the origin of animal heat, he experimentally sought the equivalence between work and heat. Having returned to his homeland, he wrote a memoir, Bemerkungen über die Kräfte der unbeliebten Natur (Liebig's Annalen der Chemie und Pharmazie, 42 [1842], p. 233), which was of great importance for the development of science, so much so that M. was called “the Galileo of the nineteenth century.” He was an avowed anti-materialist, anti-Darwinist, and at times an apologist for spiritualism and for the harmony between Christian faith and science. At the Congress of Innsbruck (1869) he declared: “With all my heart I exclaim: a sound philosophy can neither be nor ought to be anything other than a propaedeutic to the Christian religion.” A Protestant, he entertained sympathies for the Catholic Church and for some time cultivated the idea of entering II.