DUMAS, JEAN BAPTISTE ANDRE French chemist, was born at Alais (Gard) on July 15, 1800. He was apprenticed to an apothecary in his native town. In 1816 he moved to Geneva. There he attended the lectures of Pictet, de la Rive and A. P. de Candolle, and before he was 21 he was engaged with Dr. J. L. Prevost in original work on problems of physiolog ical chemistry, and even of embryology. In 1823 A. von Hum boldt induced him to go to Paris, which he made his home for the rest of his life. He became a member of the National Legislative Assembly in 1849; he acted as minister of agriculture and com merce for a few months in 1850-51, and subsequently became a senator, president of the municipal council of Paris and master of the French mint ; but his official career came to a sudden end with the fall of the Second Empire. He died at Cannes on April II, 1884.
Dumas is one of the greatest figures in the chemical history of the middle part of the 19th century. He was one of the first to criticize the electrochemical doctrines of J. J. Berzelius, which at the time his work began were widely accepted as the true theory of the constitution of compound bodies, and opposed a unitary view to the dualistic conception of the Swedish chemist. In a paper on the atomic theory (1826) he anticipated ideas which are frequently supposed to belong to a later period ; and the con tinuation of these studies led him to the ideas about substitution ("metalepsis") which were developed about 1839 into the theory ("Older Type Theory") that in organic chemistry there are cer tain types which remain unchanged even when their hydrogen is replaced by an equivalent quantity of a haloid element. Many of his researches were carried out in support of these views, one of the most important being that on the action of chlorine on acetic acid to form trichloracetic acid—a derivative of essentially the same character as the acetic acid itself. In the 1826 paper he described his method for ascertaining vapour densities, and the redeterminations which he undertook by its aid of the atomic weights of carbon and oxygen proved the forerunners of a long series which included some 3o of the elements, the results being mostly published in 1858-6o. He devised a method of great value in the quantitative analysis of organic substances for the estima tion of nitrogen, while the classification of organic compounds into homologous series was advanced as one consequence of his re searches into the acids generated by the oxidation of the alcohols. Dumas was a prolific writer, and his numerous books, essays, memorial addresses, etc., are written in a clear and graceful style. His earliest large work was a treatise (8 vols., 1828-48) on applied chemistry. In the Essai de statique chimique des etres organises (1841), written jointly with J. B. J. D. Boussingault (1802-87), he treated the chemistry of life, both plant and animal ; this book brought him into conflict with Liebig, who conceived that some of his prior work had been appropriated without due acknowledg ment. In 1824, in conjunction with J. V. Audouin and A. T. Brongniart, he founded the Annales des sciences naturelles, and from 184o he was one of the editors of the Annales de chimie et de physique. As a teacher Dumas was the first French chemist to adopt the practical laboratory teaching instituted at Giessen by Liebig. He used this method at the Ecole Polytechnique and after wards in his own laboratory. A member of the Academie des Sciences from 1832, he became its perpetual secretary in 1868, and was elected to the French Academy in 1875 to the chair left va cant by the death of Guizot.
DU MAURIER, GEORGE LOUIS PALMELLA BUS SON (1834-1896), British artist and writer, was born in Paris. His father, a naturalized British subject, was the son of emigres who had left France during the Reign of Terror and settled in London. In Peter Ibbetson, the first of the three books which won George Du Maurier late in life a reputation as novelist almost as great as he had enjoyed as artist and humorist for more than a generation, the author tells in the form of fiction the story of his singularly happy childhood which was mostly spent at Passy. After some years at a Paris school, he left (in 1851) to study chemistry at University College, London, actually setting up as an analytical chemist afterwards in Bucklersbury. But this was clearly not to be his metier, and the year 1856 found him once more in Paris, in the Quartier Latin this time, in the core of that art-world of which in Trilby, 4o years later, he was to produce with pen and pencil so idealistic and fascinating a picture. Then (like Barty Josselin in The Martian, his third novel) he spent some years in Belgium and the Netherlands, experiencing at Antwerp in 1857, when he was working in the studio of van Lerius, the one great misfortune of his lif e—the gradual loss of sight in his left eye, accompanied by alarming symptoms in his right. It was a period of tragic anxiety, but the cloud was soon to show its silver lining, for, about Christmas-time 1858, there came to the forlorn invalid a copy of Punch's Almanac, and with it the dawn of a new era in his career.
There can be little doubt that the study of this Almanac, and especially of Leech's drawings in it, fired him with the ambition of making his name as a graphic humorist ; and it was not long after his return to London in 186o that he sent in his first contribu tion (very much in Leech's manner) to Punch. Mark Lemon, then editor, appreciated his talent, and on Leech's death in 1865 appointed him his successor, counselling him with wise discrimina tion not to try to be "too funny," but "to undertake the light and graceful business" and be the "romantic tenor" in Mr. Punch's little company, while Keene, as Du Maurier puts it, "with his mag nificent highly-trained basso, sang the comic songs." These re spective roles the two artists continued to play until the end, and Du Maurier himself in his book on Social Pictorial Satire has set forth their points both of resemblance and of difference. Besides working for Punch he illustrated several books, including his own novels, and from time to time he sent pretty and graceful pictures to the exhibitions of the Royal Society of Painters in Water Colour, to which he was elected in 1881. In 1885 the first exhibi tion of his works at the Fine Art Society took place. He died on October 8, 1896, and was buried in the Hampstead parish church yard. He left a family of two sons—the elder, Major Guy Du Maurier (1865-1915), a soldier who became more widely known in 1909 as author of the military play An Englishman's Home, and the second, Gerald (later, Sir), a well-known actor—and three daughters.
See Thomas Armstrong, C.B.; a Memoir (1912) , and T. Martin Wood, George Du Manlier (1913). Other volumes containing in formation about Du Maurier's life and work are: M. H. Spielmann, The History of Punch; Felix Moscheles, In Bohemia with Du Maurier; Century Magazine (1883) ; Harper's Magazine (Sept. 1897, June 1899). See also Ruskin, Art of England, Lecture 5, Pennell, Pen Drawing and Pen-Draughtsmen, and Muther, Modern Painting. (F. W. W.)