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Johann Christian Poggendorff

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JOHANN CHRISTIAN POGGENDORFF (1796-1877), German physicist, was born in Hamburg on the 29th of December 1796. His father, a wealthy manufacturer, having been all but ruined by the French siege, he had, when only sixteen, to apprentice himself to an apothecary in Hamburg, and when twenty-two began to earn his living as an apothecary's assistant at Itzehoe. Ambition and a strong inclination towards a scientific career led him to throw up his business and remove to Berlin, where he entered the university in 1820. Here his abilities were speedily recognized, and in 1823 he was appointed meteorological observer to the Academy of Sciences. Even at this early period he had conceived the idea of founding a physical and chemical scientific journal, and the realization of this plan was hastened by the sudden death of L. W. Gilbert, the editor of Gilberts Annalen der Physik, in 1824. Poggendorff immediately put himself in communication with the publisher, Barth of Leipzig, with the result that he was installed as editor of a scientific journal, Annalen der Physik and Cheinie, which was to be a continuation of Gilberts Annalen on a somewhat extended plan. Poggendorff was admirably qualified for the post. He had an extraordinary memory, well stored with scientific knowledge, both modern and historical, a cool and impartial judgment, and a strong preference for facts as against theory of the speculative kind. He was thus able to throw himself into the spirit of modern experimental science. He possessed in abundant measure the German virtue of orderliness in the arrangement of knowledge and in the conduct of business. Further he had an engaging geniality of manner and much tact in dealing with men. These qualities soon made Poggendorfs Annalen the foremost scientific journal in Europe.

In the course of his fifty-two years' editorship of the Annalen Poggendorff could not fail to acquire an unusual acquaintance with the labours of modern men of science. This knowledge, joined to what he had gathered by historical reading of equally unusual extent, he carefully digested and gave to the world in his Biographisch-literarisches Handworterbuch zur Geschichte der exacten Wissenschaften, containing notices of the lives and labours of mathematicians, astronomers, physicists, and chemists, of all peoples and all ages. This work contains an astounding collection of facts invaluable to the scientific biographer and historian. The first two volumes were published in 1863; after his death a third volume appeared in 1898, covering the period 1858-1883, and a fourth in 1904, coming down to the beginning of the 10th century.

Poggendorff was a physicist of high although not of the very highest rank. He was wanting in mathematical ability, and never displayed in any remarkable degree the still more important power of scientific generalization, which, whether accompanied by mathematical skill or not, never fails to mark the highest genius in physical science. He was, however, an able and conscientious experimenter, and was very fertile and ingenious in devising physical apparatus. By far the greater and more important part of his work related to electricity and magnetism. His literary and scientific reputation speedily brought him honourable recognition. In 1830 he was made royal professor, in 1834 Hon. Ph.D. and extraordinary professor in the university of Berlin, and in 1839 member of the Berlin Academy of Sciences. Many offers of ordinary professorships were made to him, but he declined them all, devoting himself to his duties as editor of the Annalen, and to the pursuit of his scientific researches. He died at Berlin on the 24th of January 1877.

P0GG10 (1380-1459). Gian Francesco Poggio Bracciolini, Italian scholar of the Renaissance, was born in 1380 at Terranuova, a village in the territory of Florence. He studied Latin under John of Ravenna, and Greek under Manuel Chrysoloras. His distinguished abilities and his dexterity as a copyist of MSS. brought him into early notice with the chief scholars of Florence. Coluccio Salutati and Niccolo de' Niccoli befriended him, and in the year 1402 or 1403 he was received into the service of the Roman curia. His functions were those of a secretary; and, though he profited by benefices conferred on him in lieu of salary, he remained a layman to the end of his life. It is noticeable that, while he held his office in the curia through that momentous period of fifty years which witnessed the Councils of Constance and of Basel, and the final restoration of the papacy under Nicholas V., his sympathies were never attracted to ecclesiastical affairs. Nothing marks the secular attitude of the Italians at an epoch which decided the future course of both Renaissance and Reformation more strongly than the mundane proclivities of this apostolic secretary, heart and soul devoted to the resuscitation of classical studies amid conflicts of popes and antipopes, cardinals and councils, in all of which he bore an official part. Thus, when his duties called him to Constance in 1414, he employed his leisure in exploring the libraries of Swiss and Swabian convents. The treasures he brought to light at Reichenau, Weingarten, and above all St Gall, restored many lost masterpieces of Latin literature, and supplied students with the texts of authors whose works had hitherto been accessible only in mutilated copies. In one of his epistles he describes how he recovered Quintilian, part of Valerius Flaccus, and the commentaries of Asconius Pedianus at St Gall. MSS. of Lucretius, Columella, Silius Italicus, Manilius and Vitruvius were unearthed, copied by his hand, and communicated to the learned. Wherever Poggio went he carried on the same industry of research. At Langres he discovered Cicero's Oration for Caecina, at Monte Cassino a MS. of Frontinus. He also could boast of having recovered Ammianus Marcellinus, Nonius Marcellus, Probus, Flavius Caper and Eutyches. If a codex could not be obtained by fair means, he was ready to use fraud, as when he bribed a monk to abstract a Livy and an Ammianus from the convent library of Hersfield. Resolute in recognizing erudition as the chief concern of man, he sighed over the folly of popes and princes, who spent their time in wars and ecclesiastical disputes when they might have been more profitably employed in reviving the lost learning of antiquity. This point of view is eminently characteristic of the earlier Italian Renaissance. The men of that nation and of that epoch were bent on creating a new intellectual atmosphere for Europe by means of vital contact with antiquity. Poggio, like Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (Pius II.), was a great traveller, and wherever he went he brought enlightened powers of observation trained in liberal studies to bear upon the manners of the countries he visited. We owe to his pen curious remarks on English and Swiss customs, valuable notes on the remains of antique art in Rome, and a singularly striking portrait of Jerome of Prague as he appeared before the judges who condemned him to the stake. It is necessary to dwell at length upon Poggio's devotion to the task of recovering the classics, and upon his disengagement from all but humanistic interests, because these were the most marked feature of his character and career. In literature he embraced the whole sphere of contemporary studies, and distinguished himself as an orator, a writer of rhetorical treatises, a panegyrist of the dead, a violent impugner of the living, a translator from the Greek, an epistolographer and grave historian and a facetious compiler of fabliaux in Latin. On his moral essays it may suffice to notice the dissertations On Nobility, On Vicissitudes of Fortune, On the Misery of Human Life, On the Infelicity of Princes and On Marriage in Old Age. These compositions belonged to a species which, since Petrarch set the fashion, were very popular among Italian scholars. They have lost their value, except for the few matters of fact embedded in a mass of commonplace meditation, and for some occasionally brilliant illustrations. Poggio's History of Florence, written in avowed imitation of Livy's manner, requires separate mention, since it exemplifies by its defects the weakness of that merely stylistic treatment which deprived so much of Bruni's, Carlo Aretino's and Bembo's work of historical weight. A somewhat different criticism must be passed on the Facetiae, a collection of humorous and indecent tales expressed in such Latinity as Poggio could command. This book is chiefly remarkable for its unsparing satires on the monastic orders and the secular clergy. It is also noticeable as illustrating the latinizing tendency of an age which gave classic form to the lightest essays of the fancy. Poggio, it may be observed, was a fluent and copious writer in the Latin tongue, but not an elegant scholar. His knowledge of the ancient authors was wide, but his taste was not select, and his erudition was superficial. His translation of Xenophon's Cyropaedia into Latin cannot be praised for accuracy. Among contemporaries he passed for one of the most formidable polemical or gladiatorial rhetoricians; and a considerable section of his extant works are invectives. One of these, the Dialogue against Hypocrites, was aimed in a spirit of vindictive hatred at the vices of ecclesiastics; another, written at the request of Nicholas V., covered the anti-pope Felix with scurrilous abuse. But his most famous compositions in this kind are the personal invectives which he discharged against Filelfo and Valla. All the resources of a copious and unclean Latin vocabulary were employed to degrade the objects of his satire; and every crime of which humanity is capable was ascribed to them without discrimination. In Filelfo and Valla Poggio found his match; and Italy was amused for years with the spectacle of their indecent combats. To dwell upon such literary infamies would be below the dignity of the historian, were it not that these habits of the early Italian humanists imposed a fashion upon Europe which extended to the later age of Scaliger's contentions with Scioppius and Milton's with Salmasius. The greater part of Poggio's long life was spent in attendance to his duties in the papal curia at Rome and elsewhere. But about the year 1452 he finally retired to Florence, where he was admitted to the burghership, and on the death of Carlo Aretino in 1453 was appointed chancellor and historiographer to the republic. He had already built himself a villa in Valdarno, which he adorned with a collection of antique sculpture, coins and inscriptions. In 1435 he had married a girl of eighteen named Vaggia, of the famous Buondelmonte blood. His declining days were spent in the discharge of his honourable Florentine office and in the composition of his history. He died in 1459, and was buried in the, church of Santa Croce. A statue by Donatello and a picture by Antonio del Pollajuolo remained to commemorate a citizen who chiefly for his services to humanistic literature deserved the notice of posterity.

Poggio's works were printed at Basel in 1538, "ex aedibus Henrici Petri." Dr Shepherd's Life of Poggio Bracciolini (1802) is a good authority on his biography. For his position in the history of the revival, see Voigt's Wiederbelebung des classischen Alterthums, and Symonds's Renaissance in Italy. (J. A. S.)