FRIEDRICH WOHLER. 463 



11. (Asfro7i. Nach., No. 475, 476). In this paper he pointed out some 

 anomalies in the intensity of the comet's light similar to what have 

 been observed from time to time in other comets. 



Plantamour was a Corresponding Member of the Academy of 

 Sciences of the Institute of France, having been elected as successor 

 to the elder Struve. He was also a Corresponding Member of the 

 Royal Academy of Sciences of Turin, and an Associate of the Royal 

 Astronomical Society of London. He was elected a Foreign Hon- 

 orary Member of this Academy on March 13, 1878. 



FRIEDRICH WOHLER. 



Friedrich Wohler, after a long manhood full of the fruits of 

 well-directed intellectual labor, after a tranquil, honored, happy old 

 age, died on the 23d of Sejitember last, surrounded by a loving family, 

 and in the full possession of his faculties. He was born on the 31st of 

 July, 1800, in the village of Eschenheim, near Frankfort-on-the-Main. 

 He entered the Gymnasium in Frankfort in his fourteenth year, and 

 there his boyish fondness for experiment quickly ripened into a strongly 

 marked taste for chemistry and mineralogy, for the study of both of 

 which sciences he had accidental facilities which influenced his whole 

 after life. At the age of twenty he entered the University of Marburg, 

 where he passed a year, and where, in a small extemporized private 

 laboratory, he began the study of the compounds of cyanogen, his 

 first paper on that subject appearing in Gilbert's Annalen, in 1821. 

 From Marburg he went to Heidelberg, and there worked in the 

 laboratory of Leopold Gmelin, whose influence upon him was very 

 marked, and who quickly perceived in him the promise of future emi- 

 nence. Here he published two papers on cyanic acid. He had at 

 this time the prospect of becoming a physician, and took his degree as 

 Doctor of Medicine in September, 1823. The urgency of Gmelin 

 decided him to devote himself exclusively to chemistry, and, after a 

 brief correspondence and warm recommendation from Gmelin, Ber- 

 zelius agreed to receive him into his laboratory. The charming account 

 which he wrote in his old ase of Berzelius himself, of his own residence 

 and travels in Sweden and Norway, and of various distinguished men 

 whom he met, is familiar to all chemists. Wohler spent nearly a year 

 in Sweden, forming a friendship with Berzelius which was never inter- 

 rupted, and which ended only with the life of the latter. He at first 

 settled in Heidelberg as Privatdocent, but by the advice of Berzelius, 

 Gmelin, and Von Buch, in 1825 went to Berlin, and there became 



