Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 38.djvu/265

Rh which he is related to us, although too early taken away; he only belonged to us for three years. Proposed by Alexander von Humboldt and Kunth, he became a member of the Academy in 1835; and then was removed by death, at the age of fifty-seven years, on the 31st of August, 1838, the fiftieth return of which day is to be celebrated by the dedication of his monument. Unfortunately, we can find only the dates concerning Chamisso's election in the archives of the Academy. Still more strangely, our publications contain no scientific communications from him except a paper on the Hawaiian language, which was read in the general meeting of January 12, 1837, in which he describes himself as an old, sick, and weary man. Yet he was able to look back on twenty years of busy work, during which he left distinct marks on several branches of science; and it seems fitting to me to remind the present generation of some of them.

In what ways and through what vicissitudes the French emigrant's son, Chamisso, rose and became a German poet and the associate of the literary lights of his time is told in his friend Hitzig's biography of him. The energy with which he pursued literary art, when applied to the study of nature, laid the foundation of a scientific career in which he became the academical associate of Humboldt, Von Buch, Ehrenberg, and Johannes Müller; and it is our purpose to enlarge upon this side of his life.

Chamisso's military career ended when in 1806 he went to France as a prisoner of war in consequence of Hanelin's violation of his parole. He formed connections there by the influence of which he received a call after he had returned to Berlin to become a Professor of Greek and Latin in the lyceum about to be established at Napoleon ville in La Vendée. The call proved an illusory one, but on his second residence in France he was drawn into Madame de Staël's circle, and received instruction in botany from her son, August de Staël. The name of the species Staëlia, Cham., in the order of the Rubiaceæ, commemorates the excursions of this pair among the rich flora of the Lake of Geneva and at the foot of Mont Blanc.

That this employment was suited to him will be evident when we recollect how, when he was still a boy at Schloss Boncourt, he "discovered insects, found new plants, and spent stormy nights looking and meditating at his open window, and that all his plays, his doings and undoings, tended to physical experiments and the investigation of the laws of nature." It is, therefore, not strange that he should have devoted himself with decisive earnestness to his new calling. He returned to Berlin, and was matriculated in his thirty-first year as a student of medicine in the newly established university. He studied anatomy under the elder Knape; and was not dismayed either by the dry lessons about bones which