Popular Science Monthly/Volume 43/May 1893/Obituary Notes
The death was announced about the beginning of the year of General Axel Wilhelmovitch Gadolin, of the Russian army, an eminent mineralogist and physicist, and a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He engaged, when not active in military duties, in research into the molecular forces that act in the formation of crystals. His chief work, which is also known to the world through a German translation, was his Deduction of all the Systems of Crystals and their Derivates from a Unique Principle. A paper on the resistance of the walls of a gun to the pressure of gunpowder gases is also noticeable for having given a new formula of minimal resistance.
Nikolai Ivanovitch Koksharoff, who died in St. Petersburg January 2d, was an eminent mineralogist and author of a work in eleven large quarto volumes, to which a twelfth is to be added, of contributions to the mineralogy of Russia.
M. Francois van Rysselberghe, Professor of Electrotechnics in the University of Ghent, and a famous inventor, died suddenly at Antwerp, Belgium, February 3d, in the forty-seventh year of his age. Among his inventions were a universal meteorograph, exhibited at Paris in 1881, which registered periodically on a strip of paper the pressure, temperature, humidity, depth of rainfall, and direction and force of the wind; and a system of simultaneous telegraphic and telephonic transmission which has come into general use on urban and suburban lines. He was counsel in electrical matters for the Belgian administration of railroads, posts, and telegraphs.
Mr. Henry F. Blackford, a distinguished geologist and meteorologist of India, died in January. Originally attached to the Geological Survey of India, in connection with which he wrote several memoirs of much value, he afterward became Superintendent of the Meteorological Department of Bengal, and ultimately of the whole of India; and in connection with this position also he published useful books and papers.