476 
THE PHARMACEUTICAL JOURNAL AND TRANSACTIONS. 
[December 14,1872.- 
terated by the addition of 20 and 10 per cent, of water 
respectively. A penalty of 20-s. and costs was imposed in 
each case. 
In another case it was alleged that the adulteration 
consisted in mixing 200 parts of skim milk with 100 
parts of new milk. For the defence it was urged that 
this was not an adulteration within the meaning of the 
Act; that to prove an adulteration it was necessary to 
show that some foreign ingredient had been introduced. 
Mr. Raffles said that he saw the difficulty, but that read¬ 
ing the section as a lawyer he could not say that the 
milk had been mixed with any other substance. It was 
not an honest transaction, but he felt he could not con¬ 
vict. He would, however, grant a case if it were ap¬ 
plied for. The summons was accordingly dismissed. 
Explosion of Gunpowder in a Chemist’s Shop. 
On Saturday afternoon last a rather serious accident 
occurred to Mr. Williams, chemist and druggist, at his 
shop, 124, St. Philip’s Road, Sheffield. Towards dusk 
he struck a match, in order to look for some article, and 
unfortunately one of the sparks fell upon a small barrel 
containing about two pounds of gunpowder, a portion 
of which exploded in his face, burning his hair very se¬ 
verely. A cry of “ Fire ” was raised, and a neighbour 
rushed into the shop and threw the contents of a water 
bucket upon Mr. Williams, whose clothes had been ig¬ 
nited by the explosion.— Standard. 
MRS. SOMERVILLE. 
The following obituary notice of the late Mrs. Somer¬ 
ville is reprinted from the Times :— 
Mary Somerville died on Friday in the neighbourhood 
of Naples, where she had of late years taken up her re¬ 
sidence. Had she lived to the 26th of the present month 
she would have attained her 83rd year. Mary Somer¬ 
ville, or, to give her maiden name, Mary Fairfax, was a 
lady of good Scottish ancestry, being the daughter of 
the late Vice-Admiral Sir William George Fairfax, who 
was a cadet of the noble Scottish house of Lord Fairfax, 
and who commanded His Majesty’s ship Venerable at 
the Battle of Camperdown. She was born on the 26th 
of December, 1789 ; her mother was Margaret, daughter 
of Mr. Samuel Charters, Solicitor of Customs for Scot¬ 
land. All that is knowm of her early life is that she 
was a great reader, even from childhood, and that she 
was brought up at a school at Musselburgh, in the vi¬ 
cinity of Edinburgh. 
Before many of the most distinguished cultivators of 
physical science were born, Mrs. Somerville had already 
taken her place among the original investigators of 
nature. In the year 1826 she presented to the Royal 
Society a paper on “ The magnetizing Power of the more 
refrangible Solar Rays,” in which she detailed her repeti¬ 
tions of the experiments made by Morich ini of Rome, 
and Berard of Montpelier. The paper had for its ob¬ 
ject to prove whether solar light is a source of magnetic 
power. By means of a prism the component rays of a 
sunbeam were separated, and those which are now known 
as the chemical or actinic rays were allowed to fall upon 
delicately poised needles of various sizes which had 
been previously proved to be devoid of magnetism. In 
every instance the steel exhibited the true magnetic 
character after an exposure of several hours to the vio¬ 
let light. Experiments were then made by covering 
unmagnetic needles with blue glass shades and placing 
them in the sun, and in all cases they became magnetic. 
From these experiences Mrs. Somerville concluded that 
the more refrangible rays of the solar spectrum, even in 
our latitude, have a strong magnetic influence. This 
communication was printed in the 1 Philosophical Trans¬ 
actions at the time; it led to much discussion on a 
very difficult point of experimental inquiry, which was 
only set at rest some years later by the researches of two- 
German electricians, Riess and Moser, who showed that 
the action upon the magnetic needle was not caused by 
the violet rays. 
In 1831 or 1832 Mrs. Somerville published her *' Me¬ 
chanism of the Heavens.’ This book, her only strictly 
astronomical work, which is largely derived from La¬ 
place’s celebrated treatise, ‘ La Mecanique Celeste,’ and 
is understood to have been originally suggested by Lord 
Brougham, was originally proposed by its author as 
one of the publications of the Society for the Diffusion, 
of Useful Knowledge ; but, being moulded on too large 
a scale for their series, it was given to the world in an 
independent shape. A few years later her name became 
more widely known by her ‘ Connexion of the Physical 
Sciences,’ which obtained the praise of the 4 Quarterly 
Review’ as “ original in plan and perfect in execution,” 
and, indeed, 11 a true ‘ Kosmos ’ in the nature of its de¬ 
sign and in the multitude of materials collected and con¬ 
densed into the history which it affords of the physical 
phenomena of the universe.” This she followed up with, 
her ‘ Physical Geography,’ which, as its name imports, 
comprises the history of the earth in its whole material 
organization. These two works, in addition to their 
popularity in this country, as testified by the many 
editions through which they have passed, have been 
translated into several foreign languages; and their 
author’s services to geographical science were recog¬ 
nized in 1869 by the award of the Victoria medal of the 
Royal Geographical Society. In the same year she gave 
to the world her ‘ Molecular and Micros<fopic Science,’ a 
work which, to use the expression of a writer in the 
4 Edinburgh Review,’ “ contains a complete conspectus 
of some of the most recent and most abstruse researches 
of modern science, and describes admirably not only the 
discoveries of our day in the field of physics and che¬ 
mistry, but more especially the revelations of the mi¬ 
croscope in the vegetable and animal worlds.” 
The publication of such a work as that last men¬ 
tioned by a lady in, we believe, her eightieth year is 
without a parallel in the annals of science. In it that 
which most forcibly strikes the reader is the extraordi¬ 
nary power of mental assimilation of scientific facts and 
theories which is displayed by its author. In it Mrs. 
Somerville first gives us a clear account of the most 
recent discoveries in organic chemistry, in the ele¬ 
mentary condition of matter, and tells us of the latest 
researches into the synthesis of organic carbon com¬ 
pounds. She next leads us on to the relations of polari¬ 
zation of light in crystalline form, and, quitting the sub¬ 
ject of molecular physics with an account of the phe¬ 
nomena of spectrum analysis as applied to the stars and 
nebulm, she begins with the consideration of the micro¬ 
scopic structure of the vegetable world ; then passing in 
review the whole of the organisms from algae to exo¬ 
genous plants, she lands us in her second volume among 
the functions of the animal frame in its lowest organiza¬ 
tions, and describes the morphology of the various 
groups of animals from the protozoa to the mollusc. In. 
thus traversing this immense field of modem scientific 
inquiry, Mrs. Somerville does not attempt to generalize 
to any great extent, much less to bring forward any 
original observations of theories of her own; but, as 
she modestly hints in her preface, she has simply given 
in plain and clear language a resume of some of the 
most interesting results of the recent investigations of 
men of science. 
For some few years before her death Mrs. Somerville- 
was in the receipt of aliterary pension, bestowed upon her 
in recognition of her services to science. This was the 
nation’s tribute to her worth. But among men of 
science a far higher value than pecuniary grants can 
have is set upon those rewards which can be bestowed, 
only by such as can appreciate the labours and aims of 
a toiler in the scientific field. And these Mrs. Somer- 
