Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 9.djvu/889

 F U S F U S 853 oil till he was twenty-five years of age. Despite these drawbacks, he possessed the elements of a great painter. Fuseli painted more than 200 pictures, but he exhibited only a minority of them. His earliest painting represented Joseph interpreting the Dreams of the Baker and Butler ; the first to excite particular attention was The Nightmare, exhibited in 1781. He produced only two portraits. His sketches or designs numbered about 800 ; they have admirable qualities of invention and design, and are fre quently superior to his paintings. His general powers of mind were large. He was a thorough master of French, Italian, English, and German, and could write in all these tongues with equal facility and vigour, though he preferred German as the vehicle of his thoughts. His writings contain passages of the best art-criticism that English literature can show. The prin cipal work is his series of Lectures in the Royal Academy, twelve in number, commenced in 1801. Many interesting anecdotes of Fuseli, and his relations to contemporary artists, are given in his Life by John Knowles, who also edited his works in 3 vols. 8vo, London, 1831. He was a man of abrupt temper, sharp of tongue, energetic in all his ways, in stature short, but robust, with a head full of fire and character. FUSEL OIL, the name applied to the volatile oily liquids, of a nauseous fiery taste and smell, which are obtained in the rectification of spirituous liquors made by the fermentation of grain, potatoes, the marc of grapes, and other material, and which, as they are of higher boiling- point than ethylic alcohol, occur in largest quantity in the last portions of the distillate. Besides ethylic or ordinary alcohol, and amylic or pentylic alcohol, which are present in them all, there have been found in fusel oils several other bodies of the CnH^^.OH series, also certain ethers, and members of the C n H 2rt O 2 series of fatty acids. Normal propylic alcohol, C 3 H 7 .OH, is contained in the fusel oil of the marc brandy of the south of France, and isoprimary butylic alcohol, CH (CH 3 ) 2 .CH 2 .OH, in that of beet-root molasses. The chief constituent of the fusel oil procured in the manufacture of alcohol from potatoes and grain, usually known as fusel oil and potato-spirit, is isoprimary amy lic alcohol, or isobutylcarbinol, CH(CH 3 ) 2 .CH 2 .CH 2 .OH, boiling at 129 D -130 C., and inactive as regards polarized light. Ordinary fusel oil yields besides another isomeric amylic alcohol, boiling at about 128, and L-evorotatory. The formation of amylic alcohol is stated by ~Liebig (Familiar Letters on Chemistry, p, 217, 4th ed., 1859) never to take place in fermenting fluids in the presence of tartar, of racemic,tartaric,or citric acid, or of certain bitter substances, as hops. It is produced principally in alkaline or neutral liquids, and in such as contain lactic or acetic acid. Schorlemmer (Proc. Roy. Soc., xv., 18G6, p. 131) has shown that amyl-compounds prepared from fusel oil and from American petroleum agree in specific gravity and boiling point, and are therefore to be regarded as identical. Variable quantities of fusel oil, less or greater according to the stage of ripening, exist in commercial spirits. Administered in small amount, it exercises a poisonous action, causing thirst and headache, with furred tongue (Brit, and For. Mfd.-Chir. Rev., xxviii., 1861, p. 101). In crude spirit made from potatoes, after its purification in the cold from noxious gases by means of charcoal, M. Rabuteau found 50 per cent, of ethylic, and 1 5 per cent, of isopropylic alcohol, and traces of propylic, and of ordi nary and a more complex amylic alcohol. He discovered that in -5^ aqueous solution ethylic alcohol was not in jurious to frogs, isopropylic alcohol killed after some hours, and propylic alcohol in a single hour, whilst the vapours of a similar solution of amylic alcohol were instantaneously fatal to them, and even diluted to as much as 500 times its bulk that body exercised on them a poisonous influence. The widely different actions of common alcohol and of such compounds as the potato-oils in intoxicating drinks, he points out, render it necessary to distinguish between the excitable cthylism produced by the former, and the dull and heavy amylism, or more properly polyalcoholism of the latter. (See Le Progres Medical, 1878, p. 979, &quot;Societe do Biologic.&quot;) To remove fusel oil from spirits, a matter of prime importance to the distiller, a great number of methods have been resorted to. A practically pure spirit can be ob tained by rectification several times after dilution with water, or by the use of specially constructed stills, as Coffey s (see DISTILLATION, vol. vii. pp. 265-6). Among the materials which have been employed for the complete defuselation of spirit are the powder of freshly burnt charcoal, which acts best when the vapour of the liquid is passed through it, and charcoal with manganese peroxide, with slaked lime, and with soap-boilers lye; also saturated solution of chloride of lime, alone or with zinc chloride ; and calcium chloride, olive oil, soda-soap, and milk. The presence of fusel oil in spirit may be suspected when the addition of four parts of water causes milkiness. It is detected by its odour when the spirit is diluted with warm water, or when its ethylic alcohol has been allowed to evaporate. To remove the last-named body and water from fusel oil calcium chlo ride has been employed. The estimation of the alcohols of fusel oil may be effected by Dupr6 s process, in which their corresponding acids are obtained by oxidizing with sulphuric acid and potassium clichromate, and eventually the quantity of barium in the barium salts of the purified acids is determined (see Analyst, Mar. 31, 1871). Fusel oil is employed in the arts as a source of amylic alcohol. FUST, Jon ANN (1 . . . . -1466), often considered as the inventor or one of the inventors of printing, belonged to a rich and respectable burgher family of Mainz, which is known to have flourished from 1423, and to have held many civil and religious offices, but was not related to the patrician family Fuss. The name was always written Fust, until in 1506 Johann Schcifier, in dedicating the German translation of Livy to the emperor Maximilian, called his grandfather Faust. After that the family called themselves Faust, and the Fausts of Asehaffenburg, an old and quite distinct family, placed John Fust in their pedigree as one of their most dis tinguished ancestors. John s brother Jacob, a goldsmith, was appointed baumeister of the town in 1445, and was first burgomaster in 1462, when Mainz was stormed and sacked by the troops of Count Adolf of Nassau. There is no evidence that, as is commonly asserted, John Fust was him self a goldsmith. He appears to have been a money-lender or banker and speculator, better known for prudence than for uprightness and disinterestedness. His connexion with Gutenberg, who is now generally, though not uni versally, admitted to be the real inventor of printing, has been very variously represented, and Fust has been put forward by some as the inventor of typography, and the instructor as well as the partner of Gutenberg, by others as his patron and benefactor, who saw the value of his discovery and had the courage to supply him with means to carry it out. This view has been the most popular; but during the present century Fust has been frequently painted as a greedy and crafty speculator, who took advantage of Gutenberg s necessity and robbed him of the fruits of his invention. Gutenberg, many years resident in Strasburg, where he was long engaged in the experiments and attempts which re sulted in his discovery of typography, is not known to have been there after 1444. His uncle Henne (or Johann) Gutenberg, senior, on 28th October 1443 took the house in Mainz called Zum Jungen, where Gutenberg afterwards carried on printing. Having already exhausted his own resources in his long- continued and costly experiments,