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les observations de Romagnési, physicien de Trente, l’aiguille déjà aimantée et que l’on soumet au courant galvanique, éprouve une déclinaison.” Now, this is literally what, since 1820, the world has been accustomed to call Oersted’s discovery.
As Oersted must have known Romagnosi’s experiment, it would have been an additional credit to him, if, in 1819 and 1820, on making known his own observations, he had just said a word about Romagnosi as pioneer in the field on which he became loaded with laurels.
In Alessandro de Giorgi’s collection of the works of Romagnosi, printed at Milan, there is prefixed to the first volume a likeness of him, engraved from a painting by Ernesta Bisi. I wish somebody would copy it by photographic means, and then multiply this portrait by the same process, for distribution among the lovers of electrical science. I can, for a similar purpose, furnish the portrait of Baron Schilling.
Arago had hardly got to Paris, when, on the 4th September, he communicated to the Academy of Sciences what he had seen at Geneva. He was requested to repeat Oersted’s experiment, which he did at the sitting of the Academy on the 11th. Two weeks after that Arago
