After two years, however, he moved to the University of Bonn, and later to that of Berlin, becoming a pupil of noted physiologists Johannes Peter Müller and of Friedrich Gustav Jakob Henle.

He accepted the appointment, and at Würzburg he remained thenceforth, refusing all offers tempting him to leave the quiet academic life of the Bavarian town, where he died.

A few years before this, there was doubt whether arteries had muscle in their walls – in addition, no solid histological basis as yet existed for those views as to the action of the nervous system on the circulation, which were soon to be put forward, and which had such a great influence on the progress of physiology.

[2] Albert L. Lehninger asserted that Kölliker was among the first to notice the arrangement of granules in the sarcoplasm of striated muscle over a period of years beginning around 1850.

"[citation needed] In the case of almost every tissue, our present knowledge contains information first discovered by Kölliker – it is for his work on the nervous system that his name is most remembered.

[2] From that time onward he continually laboured at the histology of the nervous system, and more especially at the difficult problems presented by the intricate patterns in which nerve fibers and neurons are woven together in the brain and spinal cord.

[5] In 1864 Kölliker revived Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire's theory that evolution proceeds by large steps (saltationism), under the name of heterogenesis.

[8] According to Alexander Vucinich the non-Darwinian evolution theory of Kölliker tied "organic transformism to three general ideas, all contrary to Darwin's view: the multiple origin of living forms, the internal causes of variation, and "sudden leaps" (heterogenesis) in the evolutionary process.