OBITUARY NOTICES OF FELLOWS DECEASED. 



HERMANN KOPP, who was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal 

 Society in 1888, and who died in Heidelberg on February 20, 

 1892, was born on October 30, 1817, at Hanau, where his father, 

 Johann Heinrich Kopp, practised with some distinction as a physi- 

 cian. The father occupied himself in his leisure with experimental 

 chemistry, and a few papers by him on mineral analysis and on 

 physiological chemical products are to be found in Leonhard's 

 ' Taschenbuch ' and Gehlen's ' Journal/ The subject of this notice 

 received his school training at the gymnasium of his native town, 

 where he was well grounded in Latin and Greek. The facility 

 he thus acquired in reading classical literature never left him, and 

 proved of incalculable service to him in the preparation of his great 

 work on the history of chemistry. At eighteen he went to Heidel- 

 berg, where he studied chemistry under Leopold Gmelin and physics 

 under Wilhelm Muncke. At that time Heidelberg presented few 

 opportunities for acquiring a knowledge of practical chemistry. 

 Gmelin was Ordinary Professor of Medicine as well as of Chemistry, 

 and his chemical teaching was regarded as subordinate to that of 

 medicine. Kopp left Heidelberg for Marburg, where he graduated 

 in 1838, presenting to the Philosophical Faculty as his thesis an 

 essay entitled ' De oxydorum densitatis calculo reperiendss modo,' in 

 which we trace the germs of the experimental work by which he is 

 best known. From Marburg he passed on to Giessen, attracted 

 thiiher by the growing fame of the chemical laboratory which Liebig 

 had called into existence. Here he made, under Liebig's direction, 

 the only investigation in pure chemistry that he ever published, an 

 unimportant paper on the decomposition of mercaptan by nitric acid, 

 for the most part a repetition of the work of Lowig and Weidmann 

 on ethylsulphonic acid and its salts. 



Kopp, however, elected to cast in his lot with that of Giessen, and 

 in 1841 he became Privat Docent in that University, lecturing on theo- 

 retical chemistry, crystallography, meteorology, and physical geo- 

 graphy. He now began, when barely twenty-four years of age, his 

 celebrated * History of Chemistry,' the work by which he is best known 

 to the literary world. In 1843 he became Extraordinary Professor, 

 and on the departure of Liebig to Munich in 1852 he and Heinrich 

 Will were made Ordinary Professors, and were placed in charge of 



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