104 LETTEKS OF BEEZELIUS 



Berzelius does not himself seem to have given any 

 summary of this work, for the passage in the Jdhresbericht 

 for 1848, * which treats of this paper, says with respect to 

 Schonbein's attempt to draw a parallel between ozone and 

 chlorine, bromine and iodine, and thus to represent them 

 as " oxylizations " of radicals not yet isolated : " all very 

 similar to views held thirty or forty years ago." 2 Berzelius, 

 the faithful adherent of the Murium theory, could not 

 have written thus. This view of mine is further con- 

 firmed by the fact that it can be proved that the report of 

 Schonbein's other work, for instance, on guncotton, 8 for 

 which, as we have seen, Berzelius evinced so great an 

 interest, was no longer drawn up by Berzelius himself, but 

 by Lars Svanberg. Consequently we may regard as the 

 last utterance of Berzelius on Schbnbein and his work a 

 passage to be found in the 27th volume of the Jahresbericlit y 

 which runs as follows : 



" Assuredly there is at present no chemical investiga- 

 tion so important and so much wanted by the scientific 

 world as a systematic memoir of the history of ozone in all 

 its details. Certainly no work would yield such unexpected 

 results to any man who had the courage to undertake it in 

 earnest, and who did not try to avoid the difficulties by 

 means of vague phrases," 4 a practice to which Schonbein 

 was certainly not given. 



On a sheet of paper in part filled with a draft of a letter 

 to Faraday which bears the address Rotzberg, near Stans- 

 stad, but no date, I have discovered the first hasty sketch 

 of an obituary notice of Berzelius, which, as the last 

 remark of Schonbein on his great colleague, may well have 



1 " Jahresbericht iiber die Fortschritte der Chemie" continued 

 after the death of Berzelius by L. Svanberg. Presented to the 

 Swedish Academy of Science on 31st March 1848. [But 

 Berzelius did not die till 7th August 1848.] 



2 Loc. cit. p. 1 2. 3 Loc. cit. p. 342. 4 Loc. cit. p. 29. 



