262 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Magnus, and others. Dove, being one of the youngest, outlived 

 them all. 



Heinkich Wilhelm Dove vras born at Liegnitz, Silesia, on Octo- 

 ber 6, 1803, and at the age of eighteen passed from the schools of that 

 town to the Universities of Breslau and Berlin, where for the next 

 three years he devoted himself to the study of mathematics and phys- 

 ics. In 1826 he took the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the Uni- 

 versity of Berlin, his thesis on the occasion being an inquiry regarding 

 barometric changes ; and it is significant of his future life-work that 

 his first 2:)ublished memoir was a paper on meteorological inquiries 

 relative to winds, these two subjects holding a paramount place in the 

 great problem of weather-changes. 



Dove began his public career as a professor at the University of 

 Konigsberg, where he remained till 1829, being then invited to Berlin 

 as supplementary Professor of Physics. His strikingly clear-sighted, 

 bold, and original intellect turned forcibly to that intricate group of 

 questions in the domain of physics which comprise the sciences of 

 meteorology and climatology. In these fields, then but imperfectly 

 understood, his success as an original explorer was so marked and raj^id 

 that it at once attracted the attention of the scientific world and of the 

 governments throughout Europe ; and these were but the first of a 

 long series of consummate researches and deductions by which Dove, 

 besides Humboldt, opened new fields of inquiry and laid the foundation 

 of those sciences. Stimulus and encouragement were not wanting ; 

 for he entered upon his brilliant career at a time when a most produc- 

 tive era prevailed in the rise of the exact physical sciences in Germany : 

 Goethe was still living, the glory and the giant mind of his age ; Al- 

 exander von Humboldt had stirred the world of science and culture by 

 his ever-famous popular lectures on physical and cosraical geography, 

 in the great hall of the Berlin University in 1827 to 1828, and his fas- 

 cinating " Views of Nature," translated into most civilized languages, 

 had delighted and inspired all Europe ; the first German Geographical 

 Society had been established in Berlin in 1828, second in time only to 

 that of Paris, the oldest European Geographical Society. Ehrenberg * 

 had returned from his six years' explorations in Africa and Asia with 

 immense treasures of collections and geographical and meteorological 

 observations. Leopold von Buch, geologist and geographer, stood in 

 the zenith of his fame. Carl Ritter, the father of comparative geog- 

 raphy, inspired both the youth and the learned of Germany by his 

 masterly exposition of that science in his lectures and writings. Dove, 

 then in the prime of youth, soon took a foremost rank as a lecturer at 

 the university, and among the cultured circles of the Prussian capital ; 

 the combined qualities of accomplished scholarship, of vivid and clear 

 exposition, of tine imagination, of humorous and sarcastic wit, com- 

 bined with a commanding presence, and the extent over which his elo- 

 * " Popular Science Monthly," vol. xiv., p. 668. 



