Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 65.djvu/184

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180
THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

could not be found in the libraries of Europe and 150 of which had never been published. During the discussions concerning himself and his relation to the inscriptions he retired to Leipzig as a professor and thence to Zürich, where he began his 'History of Rome.' In Ins new work in the 'Inscriptions' Italian scholars freely offered their assistance, some of them without asking for pay, so that when the king pledged $2,000 a year for six years there was no reason for hesitating to send the young scholar back to Italy. In 1857 he was transferred from Breslau, where he had been made a professor, to Berlin, given a chair in the university and elected to active membership in the academy. He became one of its most useful and prominent members, and at his death in 1903 was one of its most famous. Vol. IX. of the Latin inscriptions was published in 1862, and in the same year the 'Monumenta Priscæ Latinitatis.' Each year of this reign from $1,500 to $1,750 was expended, apart from special grants, for purely scientific purposes. Yet, in spite of its limited means, never exceeding $15,000 annually, the savings of the academy in 1857 had reached the sum of $25,000.

The death or withdrawal of many of the older members of the academy and the introduction of new members, many of them young men, brought a great change into its spirit and methods. The Grimm brothers were in the academy thirty years and did very much to increase its usefulness and its reputation. The second edition of Jacob Grimm's 'German Grammar,' the first edition appearing in 1822, contains his law of sound and gives its author a place by the side of William von Humboldt and Francis Bopp as one of the founders of the modern science of language. After the death of Stein, G. H. Pertz was entrusted by the Society for Old German History with the editorship of the 'Monumenta Germaniæ,' a work which but for his diligence and his skill might never have been finished. It was through his advice and persistency that the academy was induced to publish the 'Annals of Leibniz.' In 1844 Jacobi, second only to Gauss as a mathematician, was brought from Königsberg to Berlin and the academy. He devoted himself to the study of the functions of the ellipse. His writings for six years fill two of the quarto volumes of the academy. Trendelenberg, whose strength as a philosopher lay in his skill as a critic, and in his knowledge of all previous thought, was instrumental in inducing the academy to undertake the publication of the works of Aristotle. Peterman was famous for his acquaintance with the Armenian, Semitic and Coptic languages, and Homeyer for his studies in the middle ages and for his ability to trace in a scientific manner the history of law during that era, and to give his contemporaries a correct understanding of the history and development of German law. Of what Lepsius did for the science of Egyptology few are unaware. During the fifties the zoologist Peters; the physiologist DuBois Rey-