ey 7 eee es ee. Se Ty ee 
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NATURE 
297 
THURSDAY, AUGUST 7, 1873 
GUSTAV ROSE 
HE son-in-law of Gustav Rose, Professor G. vom 
Rath, has sent us the Nekrolog which affection and 
custom in the Fatherland unite in issuing in honour of 
those who are no more. 
The first line of this tribute to the memory of the great 
mineralogist tells truly that Germany has lost one of her 
great ones in this learned and noble man: but it is for us 
to say that it is even a wider world than his fatherland that 
has lost in him one of its conspicuous citizens. For the 
two brothers Heinrich and Gustav Rose formed a double 
Star in the constellation of illustrious men who have illu- 
minated with a brilliancy all its own the first half of this 
great century ; and, indeed, for now fifty years their twin 
lights have guided the course of their contemporary and 
of a younger generation of wayfarers on the track of 
Science. 
Certainly the death of a man like Gustav Rose is cal- 
culated to call up some wonderment in our minds as we 
look back over the brief period that even his 76 years or 
life embrace, and think in what relation that little space 
of time stands to the long history of man in regard to 
the sciences that these two illustrious brothers cultivated 
- so pertinaciously and so well. Berzelius spoke of look- 
ing back within his own memory to the dark age of 
phlogistic chemistry. Heinrich Rose first reduced to a 
scientific system the methods of inorganic chemical 
analysis, as J. von Liebig did! afterwards for organic 
chemistry ; it is but yesterday that the one, and but a 
few brief years since the other died. And now Gustav 
Rose, the first man in Germany who used the reflective 
goniometer, has followed them and Mitscherlich and 
Haussmann, and Haidinger. There still remain Breit- 
haupt and Naumann, Wohler, and a few other honoured 
men on whom the patriarch’s mantle must successively 
devolve. Let us at least pay the tribute due to the 
memory of the last of these illustrious workers whose 
chair is empty by endeavouring to take a survey of the 
work he did, and by recognising the debt we owe him for 
the results that have accrued to our knowledge from the 
toil “Ohne Hast und ohne Rast,” of fifty out of his 
seventy-six years, and no less for the example he has set 
of method and of energy in achieving them. 
The sciences that Gustav Rose devoted himself to, 
crystallography and mineralogy, have been for many 
years so little or so superficially studied in England, that 
probably few of our countrymen are familiar with the 
continuous succession and admirable quality of the work 
turned out from the study of one of the soundest-minded, 
and, let us add, one of the soundest-hearted men that 
Germany ranked among her sons. 
His country’s troubles, though they ended as far as the 
great war was concerned in 1815, had called into the | for acknowledging such a classification. 
ranks even the youngest of the four brothers Rose. Their 
father, a not undistinguished pharmaceutical chemist in 
SS ee ———— SSS 
days of the terrible conflicts to have borne his musket. 
But he was seventeen, in time to make the long march 
from Berlin to Orleans; and after the peace in 181 5 he 
set himself to obtain a livelihood in the occupation of 
mining. Overtaken by an attack of inflammation of the 
lungs, his thoughts became directed into a new direction. 
For the contagious passion for the pursuit of truth in its 
most tangible form by the path of natural science seized 
him by contact with his elder brother Heinrich ; and 
Gustav followed his example in going to Stockholm for a 
similar object to that which has drawn so many English- 
men and English-speaking men since to Germany. 
Berzelius was then in Sweden what afterwards were 
Heinrich Rose, Woéhler, Liebig, in the Fatherland; the 
great master in the science as in the practice of chemistry. 
Gustav Rose was twenty-six when he ceased to be a 
student, and of the fifty years that have run out their 
sands since 1823, there is scarce one that has not recorded 
some work or memoir by the great crystallographer ; and 
in some of those years he produced several. 
And Gustav Rose was a crystallographer and mineral- 
ogist in the completest sense. The first manin Germany, 
as we have said, who adopted the use of Dr. Wollaston’s 
reflective goniometer, he aided Mitscherlich in his dis- 
covery of Isomorphism ; and this must have been one 
of his earliest labours. : 
His first paper was an exercise in Latin on the Crystallo- 
graphy of Sphene; and in 1830 he brought out his 
treatise on Crystallography, in which recognising the 
simplicity introduced by the use of geometrical axes as 
emp.oyed by Weiss, he adopted that method of expression 
for the relations of the faces of a crystal, a method which 
has in fact been only carried out to its last logical form 
and simplest expression by the admirable system of our 
countryman Prof. W. H. Miller. 
It is not easy now to transport ourselves back to the 
time when scientific men of high eminence deliberately 
closed, or rather refused to open, their eyes to the chemical 
composition of a mineral as the most fundamental point 
in its definition and description, and to its chemical 
relations as affording the only philosophical basis on which 
to form a classification of minerals. But this difficulty of 
placing ourselves in the position taken up by Mohs and 
his school, very much arises from our not appreciating the 
situation of chemical and crystallographic research in 
their mutual valuation twenty years before the death of 
Mohs. We may for instance take two garnets, one con- 
sisting of aluminium and magnesium silicate, another of 
iron and calcium silicate. The two minerals containnotably 
differing proportions of the only ingredient they have in 
common, namely silica ; and yet their crystalline forms 
are the same, and the mineralogist could not fail to 
recognise so close a parallelism and similarity between 
the two minerals as to compel him to unite them under 
one general “natural-history” division. 
The chemistry of that day, however, was not yet ripe 
But when, on 
the other hand, the mineralogist assembled under one 
group minerals that differed in the way that, for instance, 
Berlin, had died in 1807, leaving his children to the care | Linavite and blue copper carbonate (chessylite) differ in 
of his widow, who appears to have borne out the tradition ' 
of able men owing much to remarkable characteristics in -rals as diamond and topaz, on the ground that they were 
hard and lustrous, and had the character of precious 
‘their mothers. Young Gustav was not old enough in the 
No. 197—VOL, VIII. 
their chemical composition, or such widely different mine- 
- Q 
