836 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



A singular case of almost poetic justice among storks is noticed 

 even in so old a work as Goldsmith's "Natural History/' into 

 which, it was imported from Mrs. Starke's "Letters on Italy." 

 " A wild stork/' runs the tale, " was brought by a farmer in the 

 neighborhood of Hamburg into his poultry-yard, to be the com- 

 panion of a tame one he had long kept there ; but the tame stork, 

 disliking a rival, fell upon the poor stranger, and beat him so un- 

 mercifully that he was compelled to take wing, and escaped with 

 difficulty. About four months afterward, however, the latter re- 

 turned to the poultry-yard, in company with three other storks, 

 who no sooner alighted, than they fell upon the tame stork and 

 killed him." 



■*■*■*- 



SKETCH OF J. B. BOUSSINGAULT. 



BOUSSINGAULT, says M. P. P. Deh^rain, " by applying the 

 rigorous processes of analytical chemistry to the study of 

 agricultural questions, laid the foundations of a new science on 

 solid ground. When he began, agricultural chemistry was still 

 groping in infantile efforts. ... At the end of his long life he was 

 able to see the processes of investigation which he had devised 

 employed everywhere ; his ideas, tested by thousands of exj^eri- 

 ments, taught in all the schools ; and agricultural science sure 

 enough of itself to guide those who were practicing it and lead 

 them to success." M. E. Tisserand says that " the influence of his 

 labors and publications upon agriculture was immense, and that 

 they were the real point of departure of the great scientific agri- 

 cultural movement which has been executed during the last forty 

 years." We find his life, as we review it, for one who was so 

 great in works wholly of the laboratory and the farm, to have 

 been unusually full of incident and adventure. 



Jean Baptiste Joseph Dieudonne Boussingault was born 

 in Paris, February 2, 1802, and died on the 11th of May, 1887. His 

 father, a modest tradesman, sent him to the classical course of the 

 College Louis le Grand, without any particular thought of direct- 

 ing him to science ; but one of his comrades introduced him to 

 the laboratory. of Th(^nard at the Sorbonne, and he was strongly 

 attracted toward chemistry. He became a frequent attendant at 

 the scientific courses, and was accustomed to repeat at home the 

 experiments with which he had been most struck. Classical 

 studies no longer interesting him, he left the college and attached 

 himself to the lecture-classes of Thdnard, Biot, Gay-Lussac, and 

 Cuvier, At eighteen years of age he entered the School of Mines 

 at Saint-Etienne, whence he was graduated an engineer in 1822. 

 He had already published in 1820 a memoir on platinum silicide, 



