20 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



PERSONAL REMINISCENCES OF SOME DECEASED 



SAYANTS. 



By CAKL VOGT. 



THEY die in such rapid succession ! You hardly have time, after 

 returning from a funeral, to think about who is to be the suc- 

 cessor of the lamented dead, when you hear of the demise of another 

 illustrious colleague. The members of the Paris Academy of Sciences 

 can scarcely find competent successors for the dead celebrities among 

 the few representatives of the new generation ; yet the places of those 

 celebrities must be filled, although everybody knows that the new men 

 will but poorly fill those places. Leverrier, Becquerel, Regnault, Claude 

 Bernard where are the names among the younger savants that equal 

 them, or that might be hoped one day to eclipse their predecessors ? 



I was fortunate enough to be personally acquainted with these four 

 men, and hence I may be permitted to add to the numerous notices 

 that have been written of their signal scientific achievements some 

 impressions which I have retained from my personal intercourse with 

 them. 



In the years 1834 and 1835 I worked as a very young student of 

 medicine in Liebig's laboratory at Giessen in the summer of 1S34 only 

 now and then, but later continually with the firm determination of 

 turning my back upon medicine as soon as possible, and of becoming a 

 professional chemist. The former resolution I succeeded in carrying 

 out, but I had to leave the chemical career, originally from want of 

 means. At that time only a few young men worked in the laboratory 

 among them a mercurial, gay Frenchman, who was known all over 

 Giessen on account of a large yellow spot upon his elegantly-made blue 

 coat. Demarcay that was the name of our Parisian refused to re- 

 move the spot, which had been caused by some sort of acid, nor would 

 he cast the coat aside. In Giessen, he said, there was no tailor com- 

 petent to mend or only to imitate a Paris-made garment. One day 

 Liebig entered the laboratory with a slender little Frenchman, who 

 wore the same kind of blue coat, but without a spot, and introduced 

 him to us as M. Regnault, a student of the Paris School of Mines, who 

 was to familiarize himself here with organic analysis, then the hobby 

 of savants. Demarcay was of dark complexion, with raven-black hair, 

 witty, and fond of practical jokes ; Regnault was ruddy and fair, with 

 long, light-colored hair, grave, but confiding. He spoke German very 

 well, and, as he had a seat by my side, we were not long in becoming 

 good friends. He was the perfect type of a rather delicate North-Ger- 

 man or Scandinavian youth whom you might have almost taken for a 

 boy of fifteen, so slight and fragile was his form, so amiable and pleas- 



