named in honour of John Fitch, a citizen who did much to secure incorporation; it was chartered as a city in 1872.
See W. A. Emerson, Fitchburg, Massachusetts, Past and Present (Fitchburg, 1887).
FITTIG, RUDOLF (1835– ), German chemist, was born
at Hamburg on the 6th of December 1835. He studied chemistry
at Göttingen, graduating as Ph.D. with a dissertation on
acetone in 1858. He subsequently held several appointments at
Göttingen, being privat docent (1860), and extraordinary
professor (1870). In 1870 he obtained the chair at Tübingen,
and in 1876 that at Strassburg, where the laboratories were
erected from his designs. Fittig’s researches are entirely in
organic chemistry, and cover an exceptionally wide field. The
aldehydes and ketones provided material for his earlier work.
He observed that aldehydes and ketones may suffer reduction in
neutral, alkaline, and sometimes acid solution to secondary
and tertiary glycols, substances which he named pinacones;
and also that certain pinacones when distilled with dilute
sulphuric acid gave compounds, which he named pinacolines.
The unsaturated acids, also received much attention, and he
discovered the internal anhydrides of oxyacids, termed lactones.
In 1863 he introduced the reaction known by his name. In
1855 Adolph Wurtz had shown that when sodium acted upon
alkyl iodides, the alkyl residues combined to form more complex
hydrocarbons; Fittig developed this method by showing that a
mixture of an aromatic and alkyl haloid, under similar treatment,
yielded homologues of benzene. His investigations on Perkin’s
reaction led him to an explanation of its mechanism which
appeared to be more in accordance with the facts. The question,
however, is one of much difficulty, and the exact course of the
reaction appears to await solution. These researches incidentally
solved the constitution of coumarin, the odoriferous principle
of woodruff. Fittig and Erdmann’s observation that phenyl
isocrotonic acid readily yielded α-naphthol by loss of water was
of much importance, since it afforded valuable evidence as to
the constitution of naphthalene. They also investigated certain
hydrocarbons occurring in the high boiling point fraction of the
coal tar distillate and solved the constitution of phenanthrene.
We also owe much of our knowledge of the alkaloid piperine to
Fittig, who in collaboration with Ira Remsen established its
constitution in 1871. Fittig has published two widely used
text-books; he edited several editions of Wohler’s Grundriss
der organischen Chemie (11th ed., 1887) and wrote an Unorganische
Chemie (1st ed., 1872; 3rd, 1882). His researches have been
recognized by many scientific societies and institutions, the Royal
Society awarding him the Davy medal in 1906.
FITTON, MARY (c. 1578–1647), identified by some writers
with the “dark lady” of Shakespeare’s sonnets, was the daughter
of Sir Edward Fitton of Gawsworth, Cheshire, and was baptized
on the 24th of June 1578. Her elder sister, Anne, married John
Newdigate in 1587, in her fourteenth year. About 1595 Mary
Fitton became maid of honour to Queen Elizabeth. Her father
recommended her to the care of Sir William Knollys, comptroller
of the queen’s household, who promised to defend the “innocent
lamb” from the “wolfish cruelty and fox-like subtlety of the
tame beasts of this place.” Sir William was fifty and already
married, but he soon became suitor to Mary Fitton, in hope of the
speedy death of the actual Lady Knollys, and appears to have
received considerable encouragement. There is no hint in her
authenticated biography that she was acquainted with Shakespeare.
William Kemp, who was a clown in Shakespeare’s
company, dedicated his Nine Daies Wonder to Mistress Anne
(perhaps an error for Mary) Fitton, “Maid of Honour to Elizabeth”;
and there is a sonnet addressed to her in an anonymous
volume, A Woman’s Woorth defended against all the Men in the
World (1599). In 1600 Mary Fitton led a dance in court festivities
at which William Herbert, later earl of Pembroke, is known
to have been present; and shortly afterwards she became his
mistress. In February 1601 Pembroke was sent to the Fleet
in connexion with this affair, but Mary Fitton, whose child
died soon after its birth, appears to have simply been dismissed
from court. Mary Fitton seems to have gone to her sister, Lady
Newdigate, at Arbury. A second scandal has been fixed on
Mary Fitton by George Ormerod, author of History of Cheshire,
in a MS. quoted by Mr. T. Tyler (Academy, 27th Sept. 1884).
Ormerod asserted, on the strength of the MSS. of Sir Peter
Leycester, that she had two illegitimate daughters by Sir Richard
Leveson, the friend and correspondent of her sister Anne. He
also gives the name of her first husband as Captain Logher, and
her second as Captain Polwhele, by whom she had a son and
daughter. Polwhele died in 1609 or 1610, about three years
after his marriage. But Ormerod was mistaken in the order
of Mary Fitton’s husbands, for her second husband, Logher,
died in 1636. Her own will, which was proved in 1647, gives
her name as “Mary Lougher.” In Gawsworth church there is
a painted monument of the Fittons, in which Anne and Mary
are represented kneeling behind their mother. It is stated that
from what remains of the colouring Mary was a dark woman,
which is of course essential to her identification with the lady
of the sonnets, but in the portraits at Arbury described by Lady
Newdigate-Newdegate in her Gossip from a Muniment Room
(1897) she has brown hair and grey eyes.
The identity of the Arbury portrait with Mary Fitton was challenged by Mr Tyler and by Dr Furnivall. For an answer to their remarks see an appendix by C. G. O. Bridgeman in the 2nd edition of Lady Newdigate-Newdegate’s book.
The suggestion that Mary Fitton should be regarded as the false mistress of Shakespeare’s sonnets rests on a very thin chain of reasoning, and by no means follows on the acceptance of the theory that William Herbert was the addressee of the sonnets, though it of course fails with the rejection of that supposition. Mr William Archer (Fortnightly Review, December 1897) found some support for Mary Fitton’s identification with the “dark lady” in the fact that Sir William Knollys was also her suitor, thus numbering three “Wills” among her admirers. This supplies a definite interpretation, whether right or wrong, to the initial lines of Sonnet 135:—
| “Whoever hath her wish, thou hast thy ‘Will,’ |
Arguments in favour of her adoption into the Shakespeare circle will be found in Mr Thomas Tyler’s Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1890, pp. 73-92), and in the same writer’s Herbert-Fitton Theory of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1898).
FITTON, WILLIAM HENRY (1780–1861), British geologist
was born in Dublin in January 1780. Educated at Trinity
College, in that city, he gained the senior scholarship in 1798,
and graduated in the following year. At this time he began to
take interest in geology and to form a collection of fossils. Having
adopted the medical profession he proceeded in 1808 to Edinburgh,
where he attended the lectures of Robert Jameson, and
thenceforth his interest in natural history and especially in
geology steadily increased. He removed to London in 1809,
where he further studied medicine and chemistry. In 1811 he
brought before the Geological Society of London a description
of the geological structure of the vicinity of Dublin, with an
account of some rare minerals found in Ireland. He took a
medical practice at Northampton in 1812, and for some years
the duties of his profession engrossed his time. He was admitted
M.D. at Cambridge in 1816. In 1820, having married a lady of
means, he settled in London, and devoted himself to the science
of geology with such assiduity and thoroughness that he soon
became a leading authority, and in the end, as Murchison said,
“one of the British worthies who have raised modern geology to
its present advanced position.” His “Observations on some of the
Strata between the Chalk and the Oxford Oolite, in the South-east
of England” (Trans. Geol. Soc. ser. 2, vol. iv.) embodied a series
of researches extending from 1824 to 1836, and form the classic
memoir familiarly known as Fitton’s “Strata below the Chalk.”
In this great work he established the true succession and relations
of the Upper and Lower Greensand, and of the Wealden and
Purbeck formations, and elaborated their detailed structure.
He had been elected F.R.S. in 1815, and he was president of the
Geological Society of London 1827–1829. His house then
became a meeting place for scientific workers, and during his
presidency he held a conversazione open on Sunday evenings
to all fellows of the Geological Society. From 1817 to 1841 he
contributed to the Edinburgh Review many admirable essays on
the progress of geological science; he also wrote “Notes on the
