His eldest son Charles, the second duke in the English peerage, died in the year 1693 of wounds received at the battle of Marsaglia.
The most important work on Schomberg’s life and career is Kazner’s Leben Friedrichs von Schomberg oder Schönberg (Mannheim, 1789). The military histories and memoirs of the time should also be consulted.
SCHOMBURGK, SIR ROBERT HERMANN (1804–1865), British traveller, was born at Freiburg, Prussian Saxony, on the 5th of June 1804, the son of a Protestant minister. In 1829 he went to the United States, but in 1830 left for Anegada, one of the Virgin Isles. He surveyed the island at his own expense, and sent to the Royal Geographical Society, London, a report which created such an impression that, in 1835, he was entrusted by that body with the conduct of an exploring expedition to British Guiana. He fulfilled his mission with great success, incidentally discovering the Victoria Regia lily. In 1841 he returned to Guiana to survey the colony and fix the boundary for the British Government. The result was the provisional boundary between British Guiana and Venezuela known as the “Schomburgk Line,” for which see the articles on those two countries. On his return to England he was knighted. In 1848 he was appointed British consul to St Domingo, and, in 1857, British consul to Bangkok. While holding these posts he continued his geographical surveys. He retired from the public service in 1864, and died at Berlin on the 11th of March 1865. He was the author of a Description of British Guiana and a History of Barbadoes.
SCHÖNBEIN, CHRISTIAN FRIEDRICH (1790–1868), chemist, was born at Metzingen, Swabia, on the 18th of October 1799, and died at Sauersberg, near Baden Baden, on the 29th of August 1868. After studying at Tübingen and Erlangen, he taught chemistry and physics, first at Keilhau, Thuringia, and then at Epsom, England, but most of his life was spent at Basel, where he undertook the duties of the chair of chemistry and physics in 1828 and was appointed full professor in 1835. His name is chiefly known in connexion with ozone, which he began to investigate in 1839, and with guncotton, which he prepared and applied as a propellant in fire-arms early in 1846. He was a most prolific writer, 364 papers appearing under his name in the Royal Society’s Catalogue, and he carried on a large correspondence with other men of science, such as Berzelius, Faraday, Liebig and Wöhler.
Many of his letters together with a life will be found in G. W. A. Kahlbaum’s Monographien aus der Geschichte der Chemie, vols. iv. and vi. (1899 and 1901).
SCHÖNEBECK, a town of Germany, in the province of Prussian Saxony, on the left bank of the Elbe, 9 m. S. of Magdeburg by the railway to Halle and Leipzig. Pop. (1905) 17,786. It contains manufactories of chemicals, machinery, starch, white lead and various other articles, but is chiefly noted for its extensive salt springs and works, which produce about 75,000 tons of salt per annum. Large beds of rock-salt also occur in the neighbourhood, in which shafts have been sunk to a depth of more than 1200 ft. There is a harbour on the Elbe here, and a brisk trade is carried on in coal, grain and timber.
See Magnus, Geschichte der Stadt Schönebeck (Berlin, 1880).
SCHÖNEBERG, a town of Germany, in the Prussian province of Brandenburg, forming a suburb of Berlin, which it adjoins on the south-west. Pop. (1905) 141,010. It has four churches, a statue of the emperor William I. and several educational establishments. It contains the railway station of the military line to Zossen and is connected with the metropolis by electric trams and omnibuses Its chief manufactures are railway plant, cigars, soap, paper and chemicals. The foundation of Alt-Schöneberg is ascribed to Albert the Bear, margrave of Brandenburg, in the 12th century while Neu-Schöneberg was founded by Frederick the Great in 1750 to accommodate some Bohemian weavers exiled for their religion. It was made a town in 1898.
SCHÖNFELD, EDUARD (1828–1891), German astronomer, was born at Hildburghausen, in the duchy of Meiningen, on the 22nd of December 1828. He had a distinguished career at the gymnasium of his native town, and on leaving desired to devote himself to astronomy, but abandoned the idea in deference to his father’s wishes. He went first to Hanover, and afterwards to Cassel to study architecture, for which he seems to have had little inclination. In 1849 we find him studying chemistry under Bunsen at Marburg, where his love for astronomy was revived by Gerling’s lectures. In 1851 he visited the Bonn Observatory, and studied astronomy under Argelander. In 1853 he was appointed assistant, and in the following year won a doctor’s degree with his treatise Nova elementa Thetidis. At Bonn he took an important part in preparing the Durchmusterung of the northern heavens. He took up the investigation of the light-changes in variable stars, devoting to this work nights which, on account of moonlight, were unsuitable for zone observations. The results of these researches are published in the Sitz. Berich. Wien. Akad. vol. xlii. For a short time he was a Privatdozent at Bonn, but in 1859 he was appointed director of the Mannheim Observatory. The instrumental equipment of that observatory vas somewhat antiquated, his largest telescope being a small refractor of 73 lines aperture, but he selected a line of work to suit the instruments at his disposal, observing nebulae and variable stars and keeping a watch on comets and new planets. The results of his observations of nebulae are contained in two catalogues published in the Astronomische Beobachtungen der Grossherzoglichen Sternwarte zu Mannheim, 1st and 2nd parts (1862 and 1875), and those of his variable star observations appeared in the Jahresberichte des Mannheimer Vereins für Naturkunde, Nos. 32 and 39 (1866 and 1875). On the death of Argelander, which occurred on February 17th 1875, Schönfeld was appointed to succeed him as director of the Bonn Observatory, and soon after his appointment he began his last and greatest piece of work, the extension, on Argelander’s plan, of the survey of the heavens down to 23° of south declination. The experience gained on the northern survey under Argelander’s direction enabled Schönfeld to introduce some improvements in the methods employed, which increased the accuracy of this work, which was practically accomplished in March 1881, some revision only remaining to be done. These zone observations afforded 363,932 separate places of stars, and form the groundwork of the catalogue of 133,659 stars between 2° and 23° south declination, which was published in 1886 as the eighth volume of the Bonn observations.
Schönfeld was a member of the Astronomische Gesellschaft from its foundation in 1863, being a member of Council up to 1869, and in 1875 becoming editor of its publications and secretary in conjunction with Winnecke. In 1878 he was elected a Foreign Associate of the Royal Astronomical Society. He died on the 1st of May 1891. (A. A. R.*)
SCHONGAUER (or Shön), MARTIN (c. 1445–c. 1488), the
most able engraver and painter of the early German school.
His father was a goldsmith named Casper, a native of Augsburg,
who had settled at Colmar, where the chief part of Martin’s
life was spent.[1] Schongauer established at Colmar a very
important school of engraving, out of which grew the “little
masters”of the succeeding generation, and a large group of
Nuremberg artists. As a painter, Schongauer was a pupil of the
Flemish Roger van der Weyden the Elder, and his rare existing
pictures closely resemble, both in splendour of colour and
exquisite minuteness of execution, the best works of contemporary
art in Flanders. Among the very few paintings which can with
certainty be attributed to him, the chief is a magnificent
altarpiece in the church of St Martin at Colmar. The Colmar Museum
- ↑ The date of Schongauer’s birth is usually given wrongly as c. 1420; he was really born twenty-five or thirty years later, and is mentioned by A. Dürer as being a young apprentice in 1470. His portrait in the Munich Pinakothek is now known to be a copy by Burgkmair, painted after 1510, from an original of 1483 not 1453 as has been supposed. The date (1499) for Schongauer s deatn.wntten on the back of the panel by Burgkmair, is obviously a blunder; see Hensler in Naumann’s Archiv (1867), p. 129, and Wurzbach, M. Schongauer (Vienna, 1880). These contradict the view of Goutzwiller, in his Martin Schongauer et son école (Paris, 1875). Cf. Schnaase, “Gesch. M. Schongauers,”in the Mittheil. der K. K. Commission (1863), No. 7.
