Popular Science Monthly/Volume 41/September 1892/Obituary Notes

OBITUARY NOTES.

Admiral Ernest A. B. Mouchez, a distinguished French naval officer and astronomer, has recently died, in the seventy-first year of his age. His scientific career began with hydrographic and coast-survey work. He had charge of the French expedition to the island of St. Paul to observe the transit of Venus in 1874, concerning which he read a report before the five academies in 1875. In 1878 he succeeded Le Verrier as Director of the Paris Observatory. Having already organized at Montsouris a school of astronomy for officers of the marine and travelers, he carried out the same idea on a more extensive scale at Paris; and for eight years past his school has been a nursery of young astronomers for the French observatories. He also organized a curious and varied astronomical museum at Paris. He was honorary President of the Astronomical Congress which has met three times at Paris; and he is credited with having conceived the idea of the map of the sky in the making of which all civilized countries are now co-operating.

The death is announced, at Buenos Ayres, May 2d, of Hermann Burmeister, the dean of South American naturalists, aged eighty-five years. He was of German birth, was Professor of Zoölogy at the University of Halle, and took up his residence in South America after having made several voyages there. Since 1861 he had been Professor and Director of the Museum of Natural History of Buenos Ayres, and Curator of the University of Cordova. Besides several works of natural history published in Europe, he was author of many important studies on the fauna and paleontology of South America, the most considerable of which were published in the Anales of the Public Museum of Buenos Ayres, a periodical founded by him, and of a Physical Description of the Argentine Republic. He is credited with having given an "enormous impulse" to science in South America, particularly in the La Plata countries.