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many of the scientific persons of Munich used to meet, and where, in 1810, Baron Schilling had first become more intimately acquainted with Soemmerring.
On the 22nd January, 1816, several experiments were made with Zamboni’s pile. The most interesting were those relating to the action of the sparks from it on the air. Schweigger, who had himself in Nürnberg paid attention to Zamboni’s pile, wrote afterwards to Soemmerring from Paris (10th May, 1816) that there the dry pile was regarded more as a plaything, but that Gay-Lussac had heard with interest the account he had given him about Soemmerring’s experiments regarding the effect of the sparks from it on the atmospheric air.
Baron Schilling was now a good deal with Aloys Senefelder, the inventor of lithography, and also with Profesor Mitterer, who directed an establishment for that art in
Munich.[1]
- ↑ In may, 1816, Soemmerring accompanied Baron Schilling to Solenhofen, near Eichstadt, where the best lithographic stones are quarried, He got here organic fossils for his collections. Already in 1810 he had described the interesting animal which he, from the likeness of its head with that of a bird, called Ornithocephalus, and which he considered to be a mammal, a bat, from which opinion, however, Cuvier differed, taking it to be a reptile, and calling it Pterodactylus. Later Soemmerring described a similar animal, which he named
