Charles Frederick Hoffmann

“ CHRISTIAN GOTTFRIED EHRENBERG.
By FREDERICK HOFFMANN.
AMONG the pioneers and master minds in the domain of natural science, during the first half of the nineteenth century, several have risen far above their contemporary co-laborers, and have attained to heroic prominence; while a few, transcending the limits of their own period, have largely contributed to giving shape and character to their time, opened and entered upon novel paths or new fields of inquiry, and thereby have immortalized their life-work, and their name in history's imperishable record. ”

“ Investigators and writers who, because at the limit of their knowledge and powers, conclude that there is no soul, ergo no immortal life, may from their own point of view be quite right; but they are not on that account by any means to be accepted as representative men of science. ”

“ Germany showered on him in profusion those honors which it but sparingly bestows except on the highest order of learning and science; and other countries amply recognized the successive results of Dove's masterly researches; there is scarcely a learned or scientific society of any note that has not his name enrolled among its honorary members. ”

“ His researches and achievements contributed to every department of the physical sciences; the minute organic creation became, for the first time in our knowledge, a new link in the scale of animated beings, and its influence upon the formation of the strata of the earth's crust and their geological history was recognized. ”

“ Carl Ritter, the father of comparative geography, inspired both the youth and the learned of Germany by his masterly exposition of that science in his lectures and writings. Dove, then in the prime of youth, soon took a foremost rank as a lecturer at the university, and among the cultured circles of the Prussian capital ”

“ The true investigator of nature should never divest himself of the idea that he is, as it were, a son in his Father's house and a co-worker, in his own humble sphere, with the great Ordainer of the universe."
The universal appreciation of Ehrenberg and his achievements found a spontaneous expression on the occasion of the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of his doctorate in medicine, on November 5, 1868, when felicitations and honors poured in upon the veteran savant from all countries. ”

“ In these fields, then but imperfectly understood, his success as an original explorer was so marked and rapid that it at once attracted the attention of the scientific world and of the governments throughout Europe; and these were but the first of a long series of consummate researches and deductions by which Dove, besides Humboldt, opened new fields of inquiry and laid the foundation of those sciences. ”

“ During the three years' course of theology, he also occupied himself with the study of natural sciences, and, through his increasing interest in the wonders of the creation, took up the study of medicine in 1818 at the University of Berlin, then as now the greatest and foremost of German universities. His efforts and researches were soon directed toward the investigation of the minute organisms and the ultimate forms and phenomena of organic life. ”

“ Risen like his famous contemporaries Woehler, Heinrich Rose, Wiggers, Liebig, and others, from the ranks of pharmacy, and carried far off from her special sphere by his application and labors during an active career, Mohr again and again betook himself to his alma mater, and, perhaps more than any one of his collaborators contributed to maintain the high place and reputation of German pharmacy in the domain of physical research ”

“ His large and invaluable collections he bequeathed to the Museums of the University of Berlin.
↑ The small too in the universe is wondrous and great,
And worlds are constituted out of that which is little. ”

“ His fame rests preeminently on the successful inquiries which he carried out with a view to the discovery of the laws regulating atmospheric phenomena, which apparently are under no law whatever, and on his isothermals and isabnormals of temperature for the surface of the globe, in which labors one can not sufficiently admire the breadth of view which sustained and animated him as an explorer, during the long, toilsome years spent in, and requisite to, their preparation. ”

“ ON September 28, 1879, the earthly career of a man closed at Bonn, Germany, whose numerous original researches and contributions to pharmacy, chemistry, chemical analysis, geology, and other branches of the physical and applied sciences, have placed him in the foremost ranks of scientific investigators. Karl Friedrich Mohr was born November 4, 1806, at Coblentz, on the Rhine, where his father was an apothecary. ”

“ Besides a series of excellent popular essays in "Westermann's Monatsheften," in 1866 appeared from his fruitful and highly appreciated pen "A History of the Earth," in which he advanced and sustained novel views on the origin of anthracite coal, the deposits of lime in the seas through the agency of plants, the occurrence of magnetic iron in basalt, and of metallic iron in meteorites, etc. ”

“ He did not address himself to beginners, but presupposed the full intellectual maturity and learning of the German gymnasium education, and his audiences were composed of men of every age and of the highest stations of society. Dove was also for years Professor of Physics at the Military and the Polytechnic Academies of Berlin, and a member of the highest boards of the Prussian Government for state examinations in the various branches of civil and military vocations. ”

“ They show Dove to have been a most thorough and successful worker and investigator in electricity, magnetism, optics, crystallography, and in such practical subjects as measures and weights, and the metric system of civilized nations. ”