of agriculture and commerce for a few months in 1850–1851, and subsequently became a senator, president of the municipal council of Paris, and master of the French mint; but his official career came to a sudden end with the fall of the Second Empire. He died at Cannes on the 11th of April 1884. Dumas is one of the most prominent figures in the chemical history of the middle part of the 19th century. He was one of the first to criticize the electro-chemical doctrines of J. J. Berzelius, which at the time his work began were widely accepted as the true theory of the constitution of compound bodies, and opposed a unitary view to the dualistic conception of the Swedish chemist. In a paper on the atomic theory, published so early as 1826, he anticipated to a remarkable extent some ideas which are frequently supposed to belong to a later period; and the continuation of these studies led him to the ideas about substitution (“metalepsis”) which were developed about 1839 into the theory (“Older Type Theory”) that in organic chemistry there are certain types which remain unchanged even when their hydrogen is replaced by an equivalent quantity of a haloid element. Many of his well-known researches were carried out in support of these views, one of the most important being that on the action of chlorine on acetic acid to form trichloracetic acid—a derivative of essentially the same character as the acetic acid itself. In the 1826 paper he described his famous method for ascertaining vapour densities, and the redeterminations which he undertook by its aid of the atomic weights of carbon and oxygen proved the forerunners of a long series which included some thirty of the elements, the results being mostly published in 1858–1860. He also devised a method of great value in the quantitative analysis of organic substances for the estimation of nitrogen, while the classification of organic compounds into homologous series was advanced as one consequence of his researches into the acids generated by the oxidation of the alcohols. Dumas was a prolific writer, and his numerous books, essays, memorial addresses, &c., show him to have been gifted with a clear and graceful style. His earliest large work was a treatise on applied chemistry in eight volumes, the first of which was published in 1828 and the last twenty years afterwards. In the Essai de statique chimique des êtres organisés (1841), written jointly with J. B. J. D. Boussingault (1802–1887), he treated the chemistry of life, both plant and animal; this book brought him into conflict with Liebig, who conceived that some of his prior work had been appropriated without due acknowledgment. In 1824, in conjunction with J. V. Audouin and A. T. Brongniart, he founded the Annales des sciences naturelles, and from 1840 he was one of the editors of the Annales de chimie et de physique. As a teacher Dumas was much sought after for his lectures at the Sorbonne and other institutions both on pure and applied science; and he was one of the first men in France to realize the importance of experimental laboratory teaching.
DU MAURIER, GEORGE LOUIS PALMELLA BUSSON (1834–1896), British artist and writer, was born in Paris. His father, a naturalized British subject, was the son of émigrés who had left France during the Reign of Terror and settled in London. In Peter Ibbetson, the first of the three books which won George Du Maurier late in life a reputation as novelist almost as great as he had enjoyed as artist and humorist for more than a generation, the author tells in the form of fiction the story of his singularly happy childhood. He was brought to London, indeed, when three or four years old, and spent in Devonshire Terrace and elsewhere two colourless years; but vague memories of this period were suddenly exchanged one beautiful day in June—“the first day of his conscious existence”—for the charming realities of a French garden and “an old yellow house with green shutters and mansard roofs of slate.” Here, at Passy, with his “gay and jovial father” and his young English mother, the boy spent “seven years of sweet priceless home-life—seven times four changing seasons of simple genial prae-Imperial Frenchness.” The second chapter of Du Maurier’s life had for scene a Paris school, very much in the style of that “Institution F. Brossard” which he describes, at once so vividly and so sympathetically, in The Martian; and like “Barty Josselin’s” schoolfellow and biographer, he left it (in 1851) to study chemistry at University College, London, actually setting up as an analytical chemist afterwards in Bucklersbury. But this was clearly not to be his métier, and the year 1856 found him once more in Paris, in the Quartier Latin this time, in the core of that art-world of which in Trilby, forty years later, he was to produce with pen and pencil so idealistic and fascinating a picture. Then, like “Barty Josselin” himself, he spent some years in Belgium and the Netherlands, experiencing at Antwerp in 1857, when he was working in the studio of van Lerius, the one great misfortune of his life—the gradual loss of sight in his left eye, accompanied by alarming symptoms in his right. It was a period of tragic anxiety, for it seemed possible that the right eye might also become affected; but this did not happen, and the dismal cloud was soon to show its silver lining, for, about Christmastime 1858, there came to the forlorn invalid a copy of Punch’s Almanac, and with it the dawn of a new era in his career.
There can be little doubt that the study of this Almanac, and especially of Leech’s drawings in it, fired him with the ambition of making his name as a graphic humorist; and it was not long after his return to London in 1860 that he sent in his first contribution (very much in Leech’s manner) to Punch. Mark Lemon, then editor, appreciated his talent, and on Leech’s death in 1865 appointed him his successor, counselling him with wise discrimination not to try to be “too funny,” but “to undertake the light and graceful business” and be the “romantic tenor” in Mr Punch’s little company, while Keene, as Du Maurier puts it, “with his magnificent highly-trained basso, sang the comic songs.” These respective rôles the two artists continued to play until the end, seldom trespassing on each other’s province; the “comic songs” finding their inspiration principally in the life of the homely middle and lower middle classes, while the “light and graceful business” enacted itself almost exclusively in “good Society.” To a great extent, also, Du Maurier had to leave outdoor life to Keene, his weak sight making it difficult for him to study and sketch in the open air and sunshine, thus cutting him off, as he records regretfully, from “so much that is so popular, delightful and exhilarating in English country life”—hunting and shooting and fishing and the like. He contrived, however, to give due attention to milder forms of outdoor recreation, and turned to good account his familiarity with Hampstead Heath and Rotten Row, and his holidays with his family at Whitby and Scarborough, Boulogne and Dieppe.
Of Du Maurier’s life during the thirty-six years of his connexion with Punch there is not, apart from his work as an artist, much to record. In the early ’sixties he lived at 85 Newman Street in lodgings, which he shared with his friend Lionel Henley, afterwards R.B.A., working hard at his Punch sketches and his more serious contributions to Once a Week and the Cornhill Magazine. After his marriage with Miss Emma Wightwick in 1862 he took a spacious and pleasant house near Hampstead Heath, in surroundings made familiar in his drawings. Shortly before he died he moved to a house in Oxford Square. About 1866 he struck out a new line in his admirable illustrations to Jerrold’s Story of a Feather. In 1869 he realized a long-cherished aspiration, the illustrating of Thackeray’s Esmond, and in 1879 he drew twelve additional vignettes for it, in the same year providing several illustrations for the Ballads. From time to time he sent pretty and graceful pictures to the exhibitions of the Royal Society of Painters in Water-Colour, to which he was elected in 1881. In 1885 the first exhibition of his works at the Fine Art Society took place. Thus occupied in the practice of his art, spending his leisure in social intercourse with his many friends and at home with his growing family, hearing all the new singers and musicians, seeing all the new plays, he lived the happiest of lives. He died somewhat suddenly on the 8th of October 1896, and was buried in the Hampstead parish churchyard. He left a family of two sons—the elder, Major Guy Du Maurier (b. 1865), a soldier who became more widely known in 1909 as author of the military play An Englishman’s Home, and the younger, Gerald, a well-known actor—and three daughters.
