262 
traveller, and with Dr. Hope, of Edinburgh; giving to the physical 
sciences the attention usually required of students for the medical 
profession, and continuing to cultivate them in his later years. He 
was more particularly attached to Chemistry, Geology and Mine- 
ralogy, and analysed the waters of many hot mineral springs, and 
found azote in all. The medical virtues which he ascribed to these 
springs, raised him high in the estimation of the Swiss. 
M. Gimbernat published accounts of his discovery in the thermal 
waters of Aix in Savoy, Baden, and other warm springs in Switzer- 
land, of a mucous organic substance, (formed, as he fancied, by 
chemical precipitation, from azote and carbonic acid,) which he 
thought was more nearly allied to animal than vegetable matter, and 
to which he gave the name of Zoogene; and he also supposed that 
he found the same substance in the thermal waters of Ischia, and in 
waters produced by the condensation of the steam disengaged from 
Vesuvius. A similar mucous substance, in the thermal sulphureous 
waters of Roussillon, was supposed by Professor Anglada, of Mont- 
pelier, to be a chemical product, from elements held in solution by 
the waters at the time they issued from the earth, and deposited 
by them in a flocculent form when they come in contact with the 
air. De Saussure, however, Decandolle, Dillwyn, and Daubeny*, 
founding their opinions on the structure it exhibits under the micro- 
scope, refer this gelatinous substance to minute Conferve; but the 
more recent discovery, by Ehrenberg; of infusorial animals in the 
warm springs of Bohemia, gives some probability to the supposition 
that these may be mixed with Conferve in the so-called zoogene 
of Gimbernat. The decomposition either of Conferve or of In- 
fusoria would afford the azote found in zoogene; but their presence 
would transfer the origin of this organic substance from simple che- 
mical agency to the instrumentality of organic life. On quitting 
Naples, in 1820, he retired to Switzerland, where he fell into bad 
health and reduced circumstances, and died at Geneva in 1839f. 
Freperick Mons, Professor of Mineralogy in Vienna, was born 
at Gernrode, in the Harz Mountains, about 1770. He lost his 
* On Organic Matter in Sulphureous Springs, Linn. Trans., London, 
vol. xvi. 1833. 
+ A short notice on Sulphate of Soda is published by Gimbernat in our 
Transactions, vol. ii., second series, p. 331. 
