PROCEEDINGS OF THE OHIO ACADEMY OF SCIENCE. 183 



of Remarkable Celestial Phenomena" and on his deathbed he 

 corrected the proofs of an article on the "Origin of Worlds." 

 He died in April, 1879, ^^ the Good Samaritan Hospital in Cin- 

 cinnati. I remember that at the time of his death there was 

 much newspaper talk of his ' having died from starvation, and 

 there was sharp comment on the fact that such a thing could 

 occur in the heart of the "Queen City of the West." Investi- 

 gation proved, however, that he alone was lesponsible. Intense 

 devotion to and absorption in study led him to neglect the wants 

 of his own body to which he had always been indifferent. Few 

 people in Cincinnati knew of his existence. Of his hermit-like 

 life, one of his few friends, his eulogist, after his death, said: 

 "For his support he lectured on science and gave private lessons 

 in mathematics, astronomy and the languages. He thus man- 

 aged to eke out a miserable existence and was in almost abject 

 poverty. He lived in a single room, cheap, inaccessible and 

 cheerless. A chair and a bedstead with a pile of rags, a worn- 

 out stove and an old coffee pot with a few musty shelves of 

 books covered with Soot were all his furniture. An autopsy 

 revealed the wreck of his vital system and proved that the long 

 and dreadful process of freezing and starving the pirevious win- 

 ter had dried up the sources of life. Yet he was the only man 

 among the hundreds of thousands of our people whose name 

 will survive the next century." 



In sharp contrast with the life of this martyr to science is 

 that of Johann Bernhard Stallo, physicist, philosopher, great 

 lawyer and distinguished diplomat. Arriving in Cincinnati from 

 Germany, in 1839, at the age of sixteen years, he quickly found 

 employment as a teacher in a private school, for his scholarship, 

 even at that early age, embraced ancient and modern languages, 

 mathematics, science and philosophy. Admitted to the bar at 

 the age of twenty-four years, a judge of the Cincinnati Court 

 of Common Pleas at thirty, he soon resumed the active practice 

 of his profession, winning a reputation as one of the ablest and 

 most brilliant attorneys of the Mississippi Valley. His legal 

 arguments were remarkable for their forceful logic and scholarly 

 presentation of facts and authorities. Throughout a busy life 



