Scientific American Supplement, No. 362, December 9, 1882Various
Science
Scientific American Supplement, No. 362, December 9, 1882
Various
Science -- Periodicals
are always interesting. As was truly remarked ten years ago, when it was
proposed by a Fellow of the Royal Society that a Copley medal should be
conferred upon him, "for two or three of his researches he deserves the
highest honor a scientific man can obtain, but the sum of his work is
absolutely overwhelming. Had he never lived, the aspect of chemistry
would be very different from that it is now."
While sojourning at Cassel, Wöhler made, among other chemical
discoveries, one for obtaining the metal nickel in a state of purity,
and with two attached friends he founded a factory there for the
preparation of the metal.
Among the works which he published were "Grundriss der Anorganischen
Chemie," Berlin, 1830, and the "Grundriss der Organischen Chemie,"
Berlin, 1840. Nor must we omit to mention "Praktischen Uebringen der
Chemischen Analyse," Berlin, 1854, and the "Lehrbuch der Chemie,"
Dresden, 1825, 4 vols.
At a sitting of the Academy, held on October 2, 1882, M. Jean Baptiste
Dumas, the permanent secretary, with profound regret, made known
the intelligence of the death of the illustrious foreign associate,
Friedrich Wöhler, professor in the University of Göttingen. He said: "M.
Friedrich Wöhler, the favorite pupil of Berzelius, had followed in the
lines and methods of work of his master. From 1821 till his last year he
has continuously published memoirs or simple notes, always remarkable
for their exactness, and often of such a nature that they took among
contemporaneous production the first rank by their importance, their
novelty, or their fullness. Employed chiefly, during his sojourn in
Sweden, in work on mineral chemistry, he has remained all his life the
undisputed chief in this branch of science in German universities. This
preparation and preoccupation, which one might have thought sufficient
to occupy his time, did not, however, prevent him from taking the chief
part in the development of organic chemistry, and of filling one of the
most elevated positions in it.
"His contemporaries have not forgotten the unusual sensation produced by
the unexpected discovery by which he was enabled to make artificially,
and by a purely chemical method, urea, the most nitrogenous of animal
substances. Other transformations or combinations giving birth to
substances which, until then, had only been met with in animals or
plants, have since been obtained, but the artificial formation of urea
still remains the neatest and most elegant example of this order of
creation. All chemists know and admire the classical memoir in which
Wöhler and Liebig some time after made known the nature of the benzoic
series, and connected them with the radicals of which we may consider
them as being the derivatives comparable with products of a mineral
nature. Their memoirs on the derivatives of uric acid, a prolific source
of new and remarkable substances, has been an inexhaustible mine in the
hands of their successors.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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