Biography of Berzelius. 3 
much science has been extended by him, and how great the 
loss it has suffered in his death. 
It was exactly at the commencement of this century that Ber- 
zelius first appeared as an independent investigator. Volta had 
just constructed the electrical pile which bears his name, and its 
astonishing effects occupied in a high degree the attention of the 
men of science of the time. The unexpected chemical phe- 
nomena produced by the pile excited the interest of chemists 
fully as much as that of physicists, and induced them to multi 
ply experiments with this remarkable apparatus. ‘lhe first in- 
vestigation made public by Berzelius was upon the effects of the 
electrical pile upon saline solutions. In the year 1803, there 
appeared in Gehlen’s Neu. Allg. Journal der Chemie an im- 
portant paper on this subject, the joint production of Berzelius 
~ and Hisinger. However manifold and remarkable were the re- 
sults which had hitherto been obtained with the Voltaic pile with 
regard to chemical decomposition, still no one had succeeded in 
discovering the laws of these phenomena. Berzelius was the 
fist to find the thread which could lead with certainty through 
this labyrinth of complicated phenomena. He shewed that sub- 
between the constituents of a chemical compound were only 
relative, and that one and the same body may behave as a base 
ceeded in disproving many erroneous views as to the effects of 
transmission of substances from one vessel into another ; but in 
his memoir he does not make any mention of the views of Ber- 
zelius, which correspond with his own ; and Pfaff, who translated 
vy’s paper for Gehlen’s Journal, felt it necessary to remark that 
three years previously Berzelius and Hisinger had made known 
