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236 [348] JENNER
GOETHE [349] £20,000 in 1806). A Royal Jennerian Society, headed by Jenner, was founded in 1803 to encourage vaccination. In eighteen months, twelve thousand people were vaccinated in England and the number of deaths from smallpox was re duced by two thirds. A hundred thou sand were vaccinated the world over by 1800.
In parts of Germany, Jenner’s birthday was celebrated as a holiday and in 1807 Bavaria led the way in making vaccina tion compulsory. Even backward Russia adopted the practice. The first child to be vaccinated there was named Vaccinov and was educated at the expense of the nation.
Jenner’s name even transcended war time passions. After the short Peace of Amiens ended and Great Britain re sumed its war with Napoleonic France, some British civilians were held pris oners. They were released because Jenner’s name was included on the peti tion addressed to Napoleon on their be half and Napoleon, alive to the advan tages of the gesture, freed them for the physician’s sake. He even had a medal struck in Jenner’s honor and made vacci nation compulsory in the French army. English medicine, however, did not hasten to honor Jenner. In 1813 he was proposed for election to the College of Physicians in London. The college wanted to test him in the classics, that is, in the theories of Hippocrates [22] and Galen [65], Jenner refused, being of the opinion that his victory over smallpox was qualification enough. The gentlemen of the college did not agree and Jenner was not elected. It was a small loss to Jenner, who died knowing that for the first time a major disease had been completely conquered. And it is true that smallpox has never been a problem for the medically ad vanced portions of the earth since Jenner’s time and has, in the 1970s, been declared by the World Health Organi zation to have been eradicated. Jenner’s discovery was a purely prag matic one, of course. Neither he nor anyone else knew why vaccination worked. The fact that it did was cer tainly satisfying enough, but more knowledge was required for further progress. Smallpox remained the only disease to be conquered for another half a century until the causes of disease came to be known as a result of the work of Pasteur [642]. [349] GOETHE, Johann Wolfgang von (gerituh) German poet
Nassau, August 28, 1749 Died: Weimar, Thuringia, March 22, 1832 Goethe, the son of a lawyer, took a degree in law himself in 1771 at the University of Strasbourg, but he never practiced. The fact that Goethe was one of the super-figures in literature, and perhaps the only German man of letters who can be mentioned in the same breath with Shakespeare, tends to obscure the fact that he had wide-ranging intellectual in terests and wrote ably (if usually wrongly) on scientific matters. He wrote a large volume on the nature of light, in which he opposed Newton’s [231] views on the formation of colors out of white light. His own view that white light was not a mixture of colors was based on intuition alone and the whole book is worthless. He was also a convinced neptunist in geology after the fashion of A. G. Werner [355]. Then, too, he concerned himself with biology in the years between 1790 and 1810 and held, for instance, that all plant structures were modified leaves, that plants and animals originated as separate archetypes which were differen tiated and specialized through the ages to their present forms (a clear expression of the evolutionary view). He studied bone structure in competent fashion, ex cept that, following his own theory of archetypes, he involved himself in the fallacious theory of the vertebral struc ture of the skull, which Oken [423] was later to popularize. It was Goethe who coined the word
[350] DELAMB RE HERSCHEL
“morphology” to represent the system atic study of the structure of living things.
[350] DELAMBRE, Jean Baptiste Joseph (duh-lahm'br) French astronomer
ber 19, 1749 Died: Paris, August 19, 1822 Delambre was bom into poverty and gained an education under great difficul ties. For a time he lived, literally, on bread and water. He attracted the atten tion of Lalande [309] in 1780 and it was then only that he began seriously to in terest himself in astronomy. He was skilled at computation and, in 1786, pro duced new tables of the planetary mo tions of Jupiter, its satellites, Saturn, and the newly discovered planet Uranus. Just before the French Revolution, the Academy of Sciences decided to work on a new system of measures based on some natural phenomena. The revolutionaries pushed for this enthusiastically as an other break with the past. It was decided to make the fundamental measure of length the “meter” (from a Greek word for “measure”), which was to be one ten-millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the equator. For this reason it was decided to make an accu rate measure of at least a portion of the meridian, a large enough portion to give the meter an accurate length. The task fell to Delambre and Pierre F. A. Mechain, who measured the dis tance from Dunkerque to Barcelona, across the full north-south distance of France. Under the conditions of revolu tion and war, the task was an enormous one that took six years. It was only when the final figure was attained and brought to the French government that the met ric system was formally adopted, in June 1799.
In 1807, Delambre became professor of astronomy at the Collège de France, succeeding his old patron, Lalande. He spent the last decade of his life writing a monumental history of astronomy. [351] RUTHERFORD, Daniel Scottish chemist
1749
Died: Edinburgh, November 15, 1819
Rutherford, the son of a professor of medicine, was a step-uncle of Walter Scott, the writer. He studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh, where Black [298] was one of his teachers. Black set him the problem of working with the portion of the air that would not support combustion, and Rutherford reported on it in his doctor’s thesis in 1772. (He received his medical degree in 1777.) He let a mouse live in a confined quantity of air till it died, then burned a candle and then some phosphorus in that same air as long as they would bum. He presumed the air contained carbon diox ide as a result and removed it by passing the air through strong alkali. What was left contained no carbon dioxide and yet was still “mephitic” and “noxious.” A candle would not bum in it and a mouse would not live. Rutherford, following the phlogiston theory of Stahl [241], believed that the air had accepted all the phlogiston it could carry and that such “phlogisticated air,” being unable to accept more, could no longer support respiration and com bustion, two processes that depended on the giving off of phlogiston. Rutherford’s phlogisticated air is now called nitrogen and he is usually given the credit for its discovery, although it remained for La voisier [334] a few years later to describe its real nature. Rutherford was appointed professor of botany at the University of Edinburgh in 1786 and in 1794 he designed the first maximum-minimum thermometer. [352] HERSCHEL, Caroline Lucretia German-English astronomer
March 16, 1750 Died: Hannover, January 9, 1848 238 [353] DOLOMIEU
SPRENGEL [354] Caroline Herschel joined her brother, William Herschel [321], in England in 1772. He was an organist and she was training to be a concert singer. Both were successful and both gave up their musical careers for the sake of their all consuming interest in astronomy. Caro line never married and submerged her self almost completely in her brother’s career. In what spare time she could find she observed the heavens on her own with a small telescope her brother made for her. She did good work and became the first woman astronomer of note. She searched for comets particularly and discovered eight of them. After her brother’s death she returned to Hannover, enjoyed the astronomical success of her nephew (William’s son), John Herschel [479], and died at nearly ninety-eight. [353] DOLOMIEU, Dieudonné de Gratet de (doh-loh-myoo') French geologist Bom: Dolomieu, Dauphiné, June 23, 1750 Died: Châteauneuf, Saône-et- Loire, November 28, 1801 Dolomieu, the son of an aristocrat, was enrolled in the Order of the Knights of Malta when only two years old and rose to the rank of commander in 1780, although he seemed to be in perpetual trouble with his superiors. He was interested in science as a hobby, and particularly in geology. His military travels enabled him to study minerals in various places and to make an excellent mineralogical collection. De spite his aristocratic heritage, Dolomieu was strongly in favor of the French Rev olution when it broke out and only turned against it at the time of the Ter ror.
He accompanied Napoleon Bonaparte to Egypt in 1798, but on his return was forced into Taranto by a storm and there underwent imprisonment and solitary confinement for nearly two years through the machinations of enemies in the Knights of Malta. He died not long after his release. Dolomieu was particularly interested in volcanoes and studied them more thoroughly than anyone before him. He could not bring himself to go against Werner’s [355] neptunism, however, and tried to work out the activity of vol canoes without making volcanic action responsible for the power that lay behind the geologic changes of the earth. The common mineral dolomite, a calcium magnesium carbonate, is named in his honor.
He is supposed to have begun his trea tise on mineralogy, published in 1801, while he was in prison, using a pen he had made out of wood, soot from his lamp, and the margins of his Bible as writing paper. [354] SPRENGEL, Christian Konrad (shpreng'el) German botanist
tember 22, 1750 Died: Berlin, April 7, 1816 Sprengel was the fifteenth and last child of an archdeacon and was himself educated for the clergy. He graduated from Halle University in 1774 and in 1780 was appointed rector of a school where he taught languages and science. Botany was his hobby. His theological training led him to think that every part of the flower was created for a reason and this included the fact that some flowers had markings that seemed to point the way to the nectar. This he felt had to be for the purpose of attracting and guiding insects. He began, in 1787, to study the phe nomena of plant fertilization in detail, and he published his findings in a book in 1793. He clearly described the role of insects in plant fertilization and pointed out that in other cases, plants were ferti lized by the wind. He also noted that in some plants, stamens and pistils devel oped at different times so that self pollination was made impossible. His absorption in his work caused him 239 [355] WERNER
PRÉVOST [356] to neglect his school and he was pen sioned off in 1794 and spent his last years in Berlin as a private tutor. His book attracted no attention at first and was brought before the eyes of scientists only through the enthusiastic praise of Darwin [554] a half century after its publication. [355] WERNER, Abraham Gottlob (vehriner) German geologist Born: Wehrau, Silesia (modem Osiecznica, Poland), September 25, 1750
1817
Werner’s life was impregnated with minerals, so to speak, from the start. His father was an inspector at an ironworks and he himself entered mining school at Freiburg, a Saxon mining center. By 1775 he was a teacher at the mining school and stayed there the rest of his professional life. He devoted himself to establishing a language for mineralogy, classifying minerals as Linnaeus [276] had classified life forms a half century earlier.
Like Hutton [297] he recognized the fact that strata occurred in a definite succession and were evolved rather than created, with the deepest stratum the oldest. Unlike Hutton, who believed in the overriding importance of heat and volcanic action in geologic history (and was therefore a vulcanist), Werner believed that virtually all strata had been laid down as sediment through the action of water (and was therefore a nep tunist). Werner believed that volcanic action was very much the exception. Whereas Hutton accepted processes that were visibly taking place in the pres ent and asked nothing more of the past, Werner found it necessary to suppose that there had been a primeval ocean covering all the earth, although there was no evidence of this. After the conti nents had been laid down through sedi mentation, most of this primeval ocean had to disappear in some fashion, which Werner left unexplained. As for vol canoes, they were merely the manifes tation of burning coal seams near the surface—and of no geologic importance. At least so Werner maintained. Werner was almost a caricature of the stage Teuton, self-satisfied and self-as sured. He did not travel at all and knew only the rocks of Saxony, but he calmly assumed that what was true for Saxony was true for the whole world. He reso lutely refused to accept any evidence or even to listen to any that went counter to his theories. He paid no attention to the experimental work of James Hall [374] and blissfully ignored the clearest obser vations that large tracts of Europe gave every sign of having once consisted of lava flows. He considered volcanoes re cent phenomena. Nevertheless he was an electrifying teacher, who attracted students from all over Europe and who left behind him a whole generation of evolutionary geolo gists, some of whom eventually broke away from neptunism. During his life time and for some years after his death his views completely overshadowed those of Hutton, partly perhaps because nep tunism was at least reminiscent of the biblical story of the Flood and therefore seemed more reconcilable with Genesis. The coming of Lyell [502] was to be the defeat of Werner and neptunism. [356] PRÉVOST, Pierre (pray-voh') Swiss physicist
Prévost, the son of a minister, studied first theology and then law, receiving his doctor’s degree in 1773. He went to Berlin for a while at the invitation of Frederick H, returned to Geneva on his father’s death in 1784, and in 1793 was appointed professor of philosophy and of physics at the University of Geneva. There he clearly established the fact that cold was not a second “impon derable fluid” opposed to caloric, the ex istence of which Lavoisier [334] had postulated to explain heat, but showed that all the observed facts concerning heat could be interpreted by means of a 240 [357] BLUMENBACH LEGENDRE
single fluid, much as Franklin [272] had interpreted electrical observations by means of a single fluid. In 1791 Prévost pointed out that cold did not flow from snow to a hand, but that heat flowed from the hand to the snow. It was the loss of heat, not the gain of cold that gave rise to the sensa tion of cold. In fact, he held that all bod ies of all temperatures radiated heat. The hotter the body, the more heat was ra diated so that heat always flowed from the hot body to the cold. A body that was not changing temperature was still radiating heat. It was, however, receiving heat from its surroundings at a rate that just matched its heat loss. In all this, he was perfectly right. Nev ertheless, although it all fitted in with the caloric theory and was held to confirm that theory, it also proved to fit in with the heat-as-motion of “kinetic” theory, as Maxwell [692] was to make perfectly plain, seven decades later. Prévost lived through the perilous rev olutionary and Napoleonic period, dur ing which Geneva was annexed to France, with only a brief arrest in 1794. After Geneva regained its freedom in 1814, he served on its legislature. [357] BLUMENBACH, Johann Fried rich (bloo'men-bahkh) German anthropologist Born: Gotha, Saxony, May 11, 1752
Died: Gottingen, Saxony, January 22, 1840 Blumenbach was the son of a well-to- do headmaster. He studied at the univer sities of Jena and of Gottingen and re ceived his medical degree from the latter institution in 1775. His doctoral thesis dealt with his thoughts on the origin of the different human races and is consid ered one of the basic works on anthro pology. In fact, he is the founder of scientific anthropology and was the first to view the human being as an object of study in the same fashion that other animals were. Blumenbach used comparative anat omy as a guide to early human history, trying to show by cranial measurements how groups of men migrated from one place to another. He was the first to at tempt a rational division of human beings into divisions. He coined the term “Caucasian” for what we ordinarily refer to as the “white race” because he thought that the cranial measurements of some of the Caucasian tribes were per fect examples of that division. Similarly, he coined “Mongolian” and “Ethiopian” for the “yellow race” and the “black race,” as well as “American” and “Ma layan” for the “red race” and “brown race.”
The division was far too simple and gave a false impression to the general public of airtight divisions, making it a little more possible to speak racist non sense in what sounded like scientific terms. This was certainly not in Blumen- bach’s mind; for one thing, he spoke out strongly against beliefs that blacks were somehow less human than whites. [358] LEGENDRE, Adrien Marie (luh- zhahn'dr) French mathematician Born: Paris, September 18, 1752 Died: Paris, January 9, 1833 Legendre was bom into a well-to-do family and had enough money to allow him to dedicate himself to mathematics. He made important contributions to the theory of numbers and to a branch of calculus that dealt with what are called elliptical integrals, though in the latter case he was quickly surpassed by the work of Abel [527] and Jacobi [541]. Legendre rejoiced in these new dis coveries regardless of the fact that they overshadowed his own years of labor. Legendre recast the textbook of Euclid [40] into a simpler and better-ordered form so that from his day students study “Legendre” rather than “Euclid.” He showed that not only pi but the square of pi was irrational and conjectured that pi was transcendental, something that Lindemann [826] was to show was so a century later. In number theory, he was the first to work out the method of least squares as Download 17.33 Mb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: 
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