152 



servations upon the surface of the globe have ever enabled us to 

 ascertain. 



The last great work upon which he was engaged was the Histoire 

 Naturelle des Poissons, a prodigious undertaking, of which eight 

 volumes have been published, and which he expected to extend to 

 twenty-five: it was undertaken in conjunction with Messrs. Valen- 

 ciennes and Laurillard, to whom also he has bequeathed the task of 

 completing it. It will contain the description of G000 species of 

 fish, 4000 of which had not been noticed in any other work. 



Jean Antoine Chaptal, Comte de Chanteloup, was born in 1756, 

 and died in April last in the 76th year of his age. He w T as Professor 

 of Chemistry at Montpeher before the Revolution, and was one of 

 the most active cultivators of chemical science before that event, 

 in conjunction with Monge, Fourcroy, Berthollet, Guyton de Mor- 

 veau, and the illustrious Lavoisier. In the year 1793, upon the 

 threatened invasion of France by the Allies, when saltpetre was not 

 to be procured in sufficient quantities for the manufacture of the 

 powder wanted by the French armies, he was invited by the Com- 

 mittee of Public Safety to superintend the establishments for that pur- 

 pose ; and his chemical knowledge so greatly improved the method 

 followed in its manufacture, as in a very short time to make the 

 produce greatly exceed the demand. He was made Ministre de 

 VInterieur by Napoleon, and continued under the Empire to fill many 

 important situations. He was the author of considerable works on 

 chemistry, on the application of chemistry to the arts, on the appli- 

 cation of chemistry to agriculture, on the art of making wines, and 

 on the art of dyeing cotton and wool, which are written in a very 

 perspicuous and elegant style, and which have enjoyed a very con- 

 siderable popularity in France. The labours of his whole life, in 

 fact, were devoted to the improvement of those manufactures whose 

 perfection depended more or less upon the most correct and econo- 

 mical application of chemical principles ; and, after his distinguished 

 countryman Berthollet, he must be placed in the first rank of those 

 who have benefited the arts through the medium of chemical 

 science. 



Francois Xavier Baron de Zach was born at Pesth, in Hungary, 

 in 1754. His taste for astronomy was decided at the early age of 

 fifteen, by the interest which he took in the observation of the comet 

 of 1769, and by the transit of Venus over the disc of the sun in the 

 same year, a memorable event which served to make more than one 

 important convert to the science of astronomy. After travelling 

 with scientific views through different countries of Europe, and re- 

 siding for several years in England, where he acquired for our man- 

 ners and institutions an attachment which continued throughout his 

 life, he settled at Gotha, in 1786, in the family of the Duke of Saxe 

 Gotha, who charged him with the construction of the Observatory 

 at Seeberg, over which he continued to preside for a considerable 

 period. He published at Gotha, in 1792, Tables of the Sun, with a 

 Catalogue of 381 Stars, and he subsequently published many other 



