The neurologist Ludwig Edinger (1855–1918), who had settled in Frankfurt in 1883 and participated in the foundation of the University of Frankfurt in 1914, reminisced on the intellectual isolation in which Senckenberg Society members worked until the turn of the century:

The four decades from the late 1860s to the turn of the twentieth century saw a fundamental transformation in the Senckenberg Society's identity. Yet historical writing on the institution, as well as contemporaries such as Edinger, who witnessed its spectacular metamorphosis into a modern biological research institute in the first decades of the twentieth century, have failed to acknowledge a less conspicuous, yet equally significant reorganization in the last decades of the nineteenth century. By 1883 when Edinger joined, the Senckenberg Society was already enjoying a revival of intellectual life after a prolonged period of inactivity since mid-century. This chapter aims to show how the arrival of an ambitious and productive generation of naturalists, a generous bequest from the Countess Bose in 1883 and the death of the old, conservative generation had set in motion a comprehensive reassessment of the institution's programme.