NATURE 



[May 6, 1897 



precision, neatness, and even elegance that character- 

 ised his laboratory work ; and Cannizzaro and his fellow- 

 assistant Bertagnini must at times have been sorely 

 exercised to satisfy the rigorous ideal of exactitude and 

 of manipulative skill required by the Professor in the 

 experimental illustration of his lectures. When not 

 employed in the class-room, his duty was to wait on Piria 

 in the laboratory. Piria during that period was engaged 

 upon those inquiries on salicin, populin, asparagin, 

 and their derivatives, by which he is best known to 

 the chemists of this time. The greater part of the experi- 

 mental labour connected with these investigations was 

 done by Piria himself during the eight hours that 

 he daily spent in his laboratory, Cannizzaro being 

 for the most part, as he says, a simple looker-on, 

 observing attentively and in silence the rare skill and 

 manipulative ability with which the work was executed. 

 Occasionally, however, the assistant would be called upon 

 to continue some experiment or analysis which Piria had 

 begun, or to prepare some material he needed ; all of 

 which he was required to perform in literal compliance 

 with the instructions he received from the master. 

 Most of the work of preparation in connection with the 

 lectures had to be done in the early morning, before Piria 

 descended from his apartments to the laboratory. These 

 preparations were carefully scrutinised by the Professor, 

 who would tolerate no slovenliness or negligence, and 

 whose aesthetic sense demanded that the apparatus should 

 not only work well but look well. Although a silent 

 worker during the day-time, and a most severe judge of 

 his assistant's duty whether in the laboratory or in the 

 lecture-room, Piria could unbend m his hours of ease, 

 and many an evening was spent by Cannizzaro with his 

 master, v.ho would then freely discuss chemical subjects 

 with his young assistant, and explain the object and 

 meaning of the work on which he had been engaged 

 during the day. 



This severe discipline, to which Cannizzaro frankly 

 confesses he owes much of the success of his after- 

 career as a chemist, was interrupted by events, which, 

 as they have turned out, had no small share in 

 determining also his success in his career as a poli- 

 tician. Returning to Sicily at the end of July 1847, 

 presumably to spend his vacation at home, the ardent 

 young Liberal of twenty-one, mindful of the events of 1836, 

 naturally found himself in active sympathy with the 

 movement of the time, and when the revolution broke 

 out in January 1848, he became an officer of artillery at 

 Messina. Having been elected deputy for Francavilla 

 in the Sicilian Parliament, he went to Palermo at the end 

 of March, and, as the youngest member of the Assembly, 

 he was required to act as its Secretary. After the bom- 

 bardment and fall of Messina on September 7, 1848, he 

 was sent to Taormina to organise resistance to the 

 advance of the royal troops. The armistice of September 

 13, extorted by the combined fleets of England and 

 France to put a stop to the atrocities of P^erdinand's 

 army, stayed for the moment further hostilities, but 

 Cannizzaro was ordered to remain at his post as Com- 

 missioner of the provisional Government. The armistice 

 ended in the following March, and after the disaster of 

 Novara, and with it the abdication of Charles Albert, the 

 Sicilian movement utterly collapsed. The royal troops 

 NO. 1436. VOL. 56] 



were everywhere victorious, the insurgents retreated first 

 to Catania and thence by Castrogiovanni to Palermo, 

 and, in May 1849, Cannizzaro, with'a number of his 

 compatriots, succeeded in escaping for Marseilles on 

 board the Sicilian frigate Indipendente. He was now in 

 exile, and led for a while a somewhat wandering and aim- 

 less existence. After a short stay in Marseilles, he passed 

 on to Aries, and visited in turn Avignon, Lyons, Nimes 

 and Montpellier. In time, however, he again betook 

 himself to his chemical studies, although his means were 

 very limited and his opportunities few. He had, of 

 course, no laboratory, but he read such books as he could 

 obtain, and visited such chemical factories as would 

 admit him. When the body of the unfortunate and 

 broken-hearted Charles Albert was brought back from 

 Oporto, to be buried in the land for whose libertv he had 

 sacrificed his kingship, Cannizzaro joined his fellow- 

 refugees in Turin in order that they might testify by 

 their presence at the obsequies of the dead monarch 

 their grateful memory of his services, and their resolution 

 that his tomb on the Superga should be to them the 

 symbol of an undying aspiration. 



Towards the end of October, Cannizzaro found himself 

 in Paris'. Thanks to a letter from Piria, he becam( 

 acquainted with Cahours, who introduced him into the 

 little laboratory of Chevreul attached to the theatre in 

 the Jardin des Plantes, where he found Cloez installed as 

 assistant. He had now abundant opportunities for work, 

 and with the characteristic ardour of his Southern blood 

 he embraced them all. The excitement of political dis- 

 quietude in Paris has never seemed to react disastrously 

 on the progr.ess of science there. Curiously enough, for 

 some inscrutable reason, it would appear to stimulate 

 it. Indeed, some of the darkest and most unsettled 

 periods of the political history of France have been 

 among the brightest arid most glorious epochs in the 

 annals of science. The stir of 1848, and the unrest which 

 followed it, were contemporaneous with an extraordinary 

 activity in chemical and physical inquiry in Paris, and 

 Cannizzaro participated to the full in the busy movement 

 going on around him. Dumas, it is true, had been swept 

 by his political convictions into the Legislative Assembly, 

 to become Minister of Agriculture and Commerce ; and 

 his laboratory in the Rue Cuvier, in spite of the seductive 

 offer of Jecker, was closed. 



Still, if Cannizzaro never came under the spell of 

 Dumas, he could witness Fremy's experiments in the 

 laboratory of Gay Lussac, and could attend Regnaults 

 lectures in the College de France. But it was to the 

 chemical work-table he mainly turned, and on this he 

 spent the greater part of his time and energies. He 

 took up the study of the amines, the existence of which 

 had recently been made known by Wurtz, and, with 

 Cloez, prepared cyanamide by the action of ammonia on 

 cyanogen chloride. An account of the nature and pro- 

 perties of this compound, published in 185 1 in conjunction 

 with Cloez, constitutes Cannizzaro's first contribution to 

 the literature of chemistry. The reaction by which they 

 obtained the substance proved exceedingly fruitful, and. 

 by the substitution of amines for ammonia, Cahoui> 

 and Cloez subsequently prepared the alkyl cyanamides. 

 Moreover, cyanamide itself, by the ease with which it 

 suffers polymerisation, gives rise to a number of isomeric 



