Page:Proceedings of the Royal Society of London Vol 60.djvu/552



Hermann Kopp, who was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 1888, and who died in Heidelberg on February 20, 1892, was born on October 30, 1817, at Hanau, where his father, Johann Heinrich Kopp, practised with some distinction as a physi- cian. The father occupied himself in his leisure with experimental chemistry, and a few papers by him on mineral analysis and on physiological chemical products are to be found in Leonbard’s, ‘Taschenbuch’ and Gehlen’s ‘Journal.’ The subject of this notice received his school training at the gymnasium of his native town, where he was well grounded in Latin and Greek. The facility he thus acquired in reading classical literature never left him, and proved of incalculable service to him in the preparation. of his great work on the history of chemistry. At cighteen he went to Heidel- berg, where he studied chemistry under Leopold Gmelin and physics under Wilhelm Muncke. At that time Heidelberg presented few opportunities for acquirmg a knowledge of practical chemistry. Gmelin was Ordinary Professor of Medicine as well as of Chemistry, and his chemical teaching was regarded as subordinate to that of medicine. Kopp left Heidelberg for Marburg, where he graduated in 1838, ‘presenting to the Philosophical Faculty as his thesis an essay entitled ‘De oxydorum densitatis calculo reperiendee modo,’ in which we trace the germs of the experimental work by which he is best known. From Marburg he pasted on to Giessen, attracted thither by the growing fame of the chemical laboratory which Liebig had called into existence. Here he made, under Liebig’s direction, the only investigation in pure chemistry that he ever published, an unimportant paper on the decomposition of mercaptan by nitric acid, for the most part a repetition of the work of Léwig and Weidmann on ethylsulphonic acid and its salts.

Kopp, however, elected to cast in his lot with that of Giessen, and in 1841 he became Privat Docent in that University, lecturing on theo- retical chemistry, crystallography, meteorology, and physical geo- graphy. He now began, when barely tweuty-four years of age, his celebrated ‘ History of Chemistry,’ the work by which he is best known to the literary world. In 1843 he became Extraordinary Professor, aud on the departure of Liebig to Munich in 1852 he and Heinrich Will were made Ordinary Professors, and were placed in charge of

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