144 
NATURE 
[Fune 23, 1870 
had to resign its position as the residence of an independent 
kingdom. The French war raged with ever-increasing 
fury,and though Mr. Magnus, the banker, found the 
means of sheltering his children from the most severe 
consequences of the national calamity, their youth was 
naturally a severe one. It appears more than probable 
that the energy and ambition which raised all of them 
high above the level of mediocrity, may have originated 
in the stern impressions of their childhood. ‘Thus one of 
the brothers, Edward, rose to the highest distinction as a 
historical painter, and is now one of the ornaments of the 
Berlin Academy of Arts. A younger brother distinguished 
himself as a physician; while the eldest, whose death 
preceded that of Gustav by some months only, continued 
and extended his father’s banking business. A son of the 
latter became prominent during the last war in Mexico, 
where, representing Prussia at the Court of Maximilian, 
he showed great energy in his endeavours to save that 
misguided monarch’s life, 
The peculiar talents of Heinrich Gustav showed 
themselves at an early age. He exhibited a rare 
proficiency in mathematics when a mere child, and soon 
expressed a wish to devote himself to the study of 
nature. At the Berlin University, founded some years 
before, the Chair of Chemistry had passed from the hands 
of Klaproth into those of Mitscherlich, who was then at 
the height of his reputation. Young Magnus was twenty- 
three years old when he published his first paper on 
the pyrophoric nature of finely-divided metals. Two 
years later he received his Doctor’s degree, and published 
a dissertation on tellurium. He subsequently passed 
twelve months at Stockholm, in the laboratory of Berze- 
lius, who gave to Germany some of its greatest savants, 
of whom Wohler, in Gottingen, and Gustav Rose, in 
Berlin, now alone survive. From Sweden he removed to 
Paris, returning to Berlin in 1831, and began there his 
university career as a lecturer on technology, a subject 
which he continued to teach till last summer. 
HEINRICH GUSTAV MAGNUS 
Nearly all his researches published during this time and 
up to 1833 were devoted to pure chemistry, A latent inte- 
rest for natural philosophy can, however, be traced already 
in his earlier publications. Thus he determined the tem- 
perature at which oxide of iron is reduced by hydrogen, 
and analyses of several minerals were followed by deter- 
minations of the decrease of density which vesuvian 
and granite undergo in fusion. These determinations 
excited much interest at a time when the doctrine of 
isomerism was making its first appearance, and every two 
substances having the same composition and yet exhibit- 
ing different properties, were subjects of astonishment 
and ofdoubt. He even published papers on capillarity, 
and on the temperature of the interior of the earth anda 
thermometer fitted to register the same, as early as 1832. 
But the researches on which his early fame was founded 
are of a strictly chemical nature. A paper on the com- 
binations of protochloride of platinum in 1828, con- 
tained the description of what is now called Magnus’s 
salt, one of the first known of that important series of 
metallic ammonium salts, which acquired later an in- 
creased importance, as a support of the theory of substi- 
tution, and a link between mineral and organic chemistry. 
Five years later, in 1833, appeared his paper on the 
decomposition of ethyl-sulphuric acid, and on two new 
acids, ethionic and isothionic acids. These acids (together 
with the sulphobenzolic acid discovered by Mitscherlich 
in 1834) became the starting point of numerous discoveries. 
They increased our knowledge of isomerism ; they pre- 
pared the way for the modern views on the constitution 
of natural bodies, and they enabled Strecker, in 1854, to 
form, artificially, a constituent substance of bile, taurin. 
“In the same year (1833) another important discovery 
concluded, so to speak, Magnus’s career as a chemist. 
Together with Ammermiiller, a doctor of medicine and 
head master of a public school in Wiirtemberg, he pub- 
lished his reSearches on periodic acid. 
When Magnus appeared again before the scientific 
ith 
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