been publicly shown of late years.

BOUSSINGAULT, JEAN BAPTISTE JOSEPH DIEUDONNE (1802-1887), French
chemist, was born in Paris on the 2nd of February 1802. After studying
at the school of mines at Saint-Etienne he went, when little more than
twenty years old, to South America as a mining engineer on behalf of an
English company. During the insurrection of the Spanish colonies he was
attached to the staff of General Bolivar, and travelled widely in the
northern parts of the continent. Returning to France he became professor
of chemistry at Lyons, and in 1839 was appointed to the chair of
agricultural and analytical chemistry at the Conservatoire des Arts et
Metiers in Paris. In 1848 he was elected to the National Assembly, where
he sat as a Moderate republican. Three years later he was dismissed from
his professorship on account of his political opinions, but so much
resentment at this action was shown by scientific men in general, and
especially by his colleagues, who threatened to resign in a body, that
he was reinstated. He died in Paris on the 11th of May 1887. His first
papers were concerned with mining topics, and his sojourn in South
America yielded a number of miscellaneous memoirs, on the cause of
goitre in the Cordilleras, the gasses of volcanoes, earthquakes,
tropical rain, &c., which won the commendation of A. von Humboldt. From
1836 he devoted himself mainly to agricultural chemistry and animal and
vegetable physiology, with occasional excursions into mineral chemistry.
His work included papers on the quantity of nitrogen in different foods,
the amount of gluten in different wheats, investigations on the question
whether plants can assimilate free nitrogen from the atmosphere (which
he answered in the negative), the respiration of plants, the function of
their leaves, the action and value of manures, and other similar
subjects. Through his wife he had a share in an estate at Bechebronn in
Alsace, where he carried out many agricultural experiments. He
collaborated with J.B.A. Dumas in writing an _Essai de statique
chimique des etres organises_ (1841), and was the author of _Traite
d'economic rurale_ (1844), which was remodelled as _Agronomie, chimie
agricole, et physiologie_ (5 vols., 1860-1874; 2nd ed., 1884), and of
_Etudes sur la transformation du fer en acier_ (1875).

BOUTERWEK, FRIEDRICH (1766-1828), German philosopher and critic, was
born at Oker, near Goslar in Lower Saxony, and studied l