Magnus, and others. Dove, being one of the youngest, outlived them all.
Heinrich Wilhelm Dove was born at Liegnitz, Silesia, on October 6, 1803, and at the age of eighteen passed from the schools of that town to the Universities of Breslau and Berlin, where for the next three years he devoted himself to the study of mathematics and physics. In 1826 he took the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Berlin, his thesis on the occasion being an inquiry regarding barometric changes; and it is significant of his future life-work that his first published memoir was a paper on meteorological inquiries relative to winds, these two subjects holding a paramount place in the great problem of weather-changes.
Dove began his public career as a professor at the University of Königsberg, where he remained till 1829, being then invited to Berlin as supplementary Professor of Physics. His strikingly clear-sighted, bold, and original intellect turned forcibly to that intricate group of questions in the domain of physics which comprise the sciences of meteorology and climatology. In these fields, then but imperfectly understood, his success as an original explorer was so marked and rapid that it at once attracted the attention of the scientific world and of the governments throughout Europe; and these were but the first of a long series of consummate researches and deductions by which Dove, besides Humboldt, opened new fields of inquiry and laid the foundation of those sciences. Stimulus and encouragement were not wanting; for he entered upon his brilliant career at a time when a most productive era prevailed in the rise of the exact physical sciences in Germany: Goethe was still living, the glory and the giant mind of his age; Alexander von Humboldt had stirred the world of science and culture by his ever-famous popular lectures on physical and cosmical geography, in the great hall of the Berlin University in 1827 to 1828, and his fascinating "Views of Nature," translated into most civilized languages, had delighted and inspired all Europe; the first German Geographical Society had been established in Berlin in 1828, second in time only to that of Paris, the oldest European Geographical Society. Ehrenberg[1] had returned from his six years' explorations in Africa and Asia with immense treasures of collections and geographical and meteorological observations. Leopold von Buch, geologist and geographer, stood in the zenith of his fame. Carl Ritter, the father of comparative geography, inspired both the youth and the learned of Germany by his masterly exposition of that science in his lectures and writings. Dove, then in the prime of youth, soon took a foremost rank as a lecturer at the university, and among the cultured circles of the Prussian capital; the combined qualities of accomplished scholarship, of vivid and clear exposition, of fine imagination, of humorous and sarcastic wit, combined with a commanding presence, and the extent over which his elo-
- ↑ "Popular Science Monthly," vol. xiv., p. 668.
