Writings of the late Professor Blumenbach. 225 



jects a proper form of expression and representation. As, 

 moreover, he regarded each result of his own investigations 

 and those of others as a seed which might produce better and 

 more enlarged conclusions, he exerted himself strenuously, by 

 writing, conversation, and lecturing, to disseminate every one 

 immediately, and to provide for it a productive soil. It thus 

 followed that he was regarded as the pillar and representa- 

 tive of natural history, that he collected around him innume- 

 rable young people, and, by words as well as works, exercised 

 the most decided influence on the whole study of that subject 

 for a long series of years. 



Blumenbach was already known to the Society of Sciences 

 as a diligent student, for, at the meeting of the 15th January 

 1774, he communicated the, at that time, remarkable fact of 

 his having (like Braun of Petersburg so early as 1759) suc- 

 ceeded in freezing mercury.* 



In the year 1781 he became a member of our Society, and 

 he soon read his paper on the eyes of the Albino and the move- 

 ment of the iris.t It was a fortunate circumstance that his 

 first literary labour related to the races of man, and that thus 

 physical anthropology became, to speak mineralogically, the 

 primitive form of his future labours. Hardly any other dis- 

 sertation has gone through so many editions, and obtained for 

 its author such general approbation as that entitled, Be Ge- 

 neris Humani Varietate Nativa.% It was the origin of his 

 subsequent gradual publication of the Decaden § on the forms 

 of the skull of different races and nations, and was the foun- 

 dation of his own collection. || To this unique accumulation of 



« Gotting. gel. Anzeigen, 1774. Part 13, p. 105-7. Blumenbach himself 

 placed no value on this experiment ; he even supposed that his friends as- 

 sumed too rashly the fact as ascertained. 



t Do Oculis Leucccthiopum ct iridis motu. In Comment. Sec. R. Gott. 

 vol. vii. p. 29-62. 



% Published first of all in 1775. 



§ The first Decas collcctionis sua: craniorum diversarum gentium illustrala ap- 

 peared in 1790 in the tenth volume of the Commentat. Soc. Sc. The last, under 

 the title, Nova Pcntas collcctionis sum craniorum diversarum gentium tainjuaia 

 complemenlum priorum decadum cxhibita in conscssu socictatis, 8//t July 1820, and 

 appeared in the sixth volume of the Commentat. reccntior. p. 141-48. Also 

 Gott. gel. Ariz. 1820. No. 121, p. 1201-6. 



|| Compare Ids treatise on Anthropological Collections in the socond cdi- 



