OF ARTS AND SCIENCES : JUNE 4, 1872. 459 



Benoit Fourneyron was born October 31, 1802, at St. Etienne, 

 France. He studied in the School of Mines of his native city, and 

 began his career as a mining engineer in the mines of Creuzot. His 

 attention was soon turned to water-wheels, and his experiments for im- 

 proving horizontal water-wheels are said to have been begun as early 

 as 1823. In 1827 his first turbine, constructed on the new principle of 

 putting a cylindrical wheel with curved floats outside of a fixed cylin- 

 der containing curved guides, was set up at Pont sur l'Ognon. It was 

 of six-horse power, and its efficiency was rated at eighty per cent. A 

 second wheel of seven or eight horse power was erected in 1831 at 

 Dampierre, and a third, of fifty-horse power, in 1832, at Fraisans. The 

 success of this invention was so marked, that a prize of 6,000 francs, 

 offered by the'Society for the Encouragement of National Industry, for 

 the best application to mills and manufactories of the hydraulic tur- 

 bines of Belidor, was awarded to Fourneyron in 1834. These wheels 

 were soon introduced in various parts of France and Germany. One 

 in the Black Forest worked under a fall of 354 feet. Gold medals were 

 awarded to Fourneyron at the Industrial Expositions of 1839 and 

 1855, and a medal of honor at that of 1867. Fourneyron was Chief 

 of Battalion of the National Guards in 1847, and in 1848 represented 

 the Department of the Loire in the Constituent Assembly. He pub- 

 lished papers on turbines, and on several other engineering subjects, in 

 the Bulletin of the Industrial Society of Mulhouse for 1831, in the Bul- 

 letin of the Paris Society for the Encouragement of National Industry 

 for 1834, and in the Comptes Rendus for 1836, 1837, 1840, 1841, 1843, 

 and 1852. A treatise on turbines was published by him at Liege in 

 1841, and a table on the flow of water in pipes in 1844. He was 

 elected a Foreign Honorary Member of this Academy, November 13, 

 1849. He died in Paris, July 8, 1867. 



Hugo von Mohl, the acknowledged chief of the vegetable anatomists 

 of this generation, died on the first day of April last. He was born at 

 Stuttgard, April 8, 1805, the youngest of four brothers who all became 

 men of mark in political and scientific life ; Julius the orientalist and 

 Hugo the botanist being the most distinguished. The latter was 

 educated at the Stuttgard Gymnasium and Tubingen University, 

 where he studied medicine as well as natural history and physics. 

 His first publication, while a student, in the year 1827, was his Essay 

 on the Structure and Soiling of Tendrils and Twiners, written in 



