GAUBIUS, Jerome-David, professor of medicine at Leyden, and afterwards fellow of the royal society of London, was born at Heidelberg in the year 1705. From the Jesuits he received the rudiments of his education, and was much esteemed by them on account of his abilities; but his father afterwards sent him to the orphanhouse of Halle, lest he should be obliged to abjure his religion. The nature of the discipline, however, he found much too severe, and at his own request his father removed him. His teacher at this hospital attributing the dislike of young Gaubius to the want of genius, urged him to give his son some mechanical employment; but his father thought proper to indulge his ardent desire after knowledge, and accordingly sent him to Amsterdam to study under his uncle John, who was an eminent physician there. After prosecuting his medical studies for some time at Hordwyk, he resolved to visit Leyden, where Boerhaave was then professor, and his penetrating eye soon discovered that Gaubius was possessed of talents above mediocrity. This celebrated man honoured him with unlimited access to his house, delighted in imparting instruction to him, and gradually forwarded the cultivation of his mind. Gaubius took the degree of doctor at the age of twenty, after a disputation on the nature of solids, containing an abstract of the system which he himself subsequently followed in practice. He then travelled through various parts of Europe, and when he returned to Heidelberg by way of Strasburg, he was appointed city physician at Deventer, in the province ofθveryssel; but he soon afterwards removed to Amsterdam. Boerhaave never lost sight of his favourite pupil; and when the infirmities of old age and indefatigable labour induced him to resign his chair, Gaubius was upon his recommendation appointed to succeed him. In 1738, he published his Instructions for Writing Recipes, which was received with merited approbation, as he had reduced the art from a mechanical into a scientific form. His Principles of Nosology is perhaps his most masterly performance, as it evinced that he was highly worthy of such a preceptor. The next publication of Gaubius, which appeared in 1771, was his Adversaria varii Argumenti, a work which was particularly interesting to chemists; and his oration on the two-hundredth anniversary of the academy of Leyden attracted considerable notice, as in it he traced out, with his accustomed acuteness, the principal epochs of the arts and sciences in Holland. He was likewise the author of numerous and valuable papers in the Transactions of the Society of Haerlem, and editor of many excellent performances, amongst which may be mentioned Cramer’s Elementa artis docimasticae, Albinus de presagienda vita et morte, and Swammerdam’s Book of Nature, which he partly translated. His literary merit spread his fame beyond the bounds of his native country, and pupils repaired to Leyden from every part of Europe. In addition to his widely extended reputation, he was blessed with the enjoyment of good health till he attained seventy years of age; and he died on the 29th of November 1780, in his seventy-fifth year. The Institutiones Pathologice Medicinalis was deemed so valuable by Professor Ackermann, that he published a fourth edition of the work at Nuremberg in 1787.