Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/279

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SKETCH OF HEINRICH WILHELM DOVE.
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So much of Dove as an original investigator and scholar. As professor at the Berlin University he accomplished more than one hundred lecture terms (Semester), and among the many thousands who have been instructed and inspired by his masterly and impressive lectures and occasional orations, most of the eminent physicists of our generation and the scientists of Germany may be counted, who all will remember with pleasure and veneration the great teacher's exquisite style, his humor and wit, the lucidity and precision of his logic and demonstration, and the elegance and perfection of his experiments. He did not address himself to beginners, but presupposed the full intellectual maturity and learning of the German gymnasium education, and his audiences were composed of men of every age and of the highest stations of society. Dove was also for years Professor of Physics at the Military and the Polytechnic Academies of Berlin, and a member of the highest boards of the Prussian Government for state examinations in the various branches of civil and military vocations. Governments, learned institutions, and societies from many countries resorted to him as the highest authority.

The celebration of Dove's fiftieth year of his Doctorate in Philosophy, March 4, 1876, was the occasion of well-deserved felicitations from all parts of Germany, from the people and Government, and from institutions and seats of science and learning. The feeling was general that the fifty years of Dove's active life in a very large degree represented and reflected the recent history of physics, and of meteorology and climatology in particular. Congratulations and honors poured in upon the veteran savant from all parts of the civilized globe, as his name and fame were well known, and his labors and achievements are still of inestimable value on all continents and to the mariner on the seas. Three years later, after a protracted illness. Dove passed peacefully away on the 4th of April, 1879, in the seventy-sixth year of his age, one of Germany's greatest and most gifted naturalists and teachers of the present century.