DÖBELN, a town of Germany, in the kingdom of Saxony, on the (Freiberg) Mulde, two arms of which embrace the town as an island, 35 m. S.E. from Leipzig by rail, and at the junction of lines to Dresden, Chemnitz, Riesa and Oschatz. Pop. (1905) including the garrison, 18,907. It has two Evangelical churches, of which the Nikolai-kirche, dating in its present form from 1485, is a handsome edifice; a medieval town hall, a former Benedictine nunnery and a monument to Luther. There are an agricultural and a commercial school. The industries include wool-spinning, iron-founding, carriage, agricultural implement, and metal-printing and stamping works.
DOBERAN, or Dobberan, a town of Germany, in the grand-duchy of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, about 2 m. from the shores of the Baltic and 7 W. of Rostock by rail. Pop. 5000. Besides the ruins of a Cistercian abbey founded by Pribislaus, prince of Mecklenburg, in 1173, and secularized in 1552, it possesses an Evangelical Gothic church of the 14th century, one of the finest in north Germany, a grand-ducal palace, a theatre, an exchange and a concert hall. Owing to its delightful situation amid beech forests and to its chalybeate waters, Doberan has become a favourite summer resort. Numerous villa residences have been erected and promenades and groves laid out. In 1793 Duke Frederick Francis caused the first seaside watering-place in Germany to be established on the neighbouring coast, 4 m. distant, at the spot where the Heiligen-Damm, a great bank of rocks about 1000 ft. broad and 15 ft. high, stretches out into the sea and forms an excellent bathing ground. Though no longer so popular as in the early part of the 19th century, it is still frequented, and is connected with Doberan by a tramway.
DÖBEREINER, JOHANN WOLFGANG (1780-1849), German chemist, was born near Hof in Bavaria on the 15th of December 1780. After studying pharmacy at Münchberg, he started a chemical manufactory in 1803, and in 1810 was appointed professor of chemistry, pharmacy and technology at Jena, where he died on the 24th of March 1849. The Royal Society’s Catalogue enumerates 171 papers by him on various chemical topics, but his name is best known for his experiments on platinum in a minute state of division and on the oxidation products of alcohol. In 1822 he showed that when a mass of platinum black, supplied with alcohol by a wick is enclosed in a jar to which the air has limited access, acetic acid and water are produced; this experiment formed the basis of the Schützenbach Quick Vinegar Process. A year later he noticed that spongy platinum in presence of oxygen can bring about the ignition of hydrogen, and utilized this fact to construct his “hydrogen lamp,” the prototype of numerous devices for the self-ignition of coal-gas burners. He studied the formation of aldehyde from alcohol by various methods, also obtaining its crystalline compound with ammonia, and he was the discoverer of furfurol. An early observation of the diffusion of gases was recorded by him in 1823 when he noticed the escape of hydrogen from a cracked jar, attributing it to the capillary action of fissures. His works included treatises on pneumatic chemistry (1821-1825) and the chemistry of fermentation (1822).
A correspondence which he carried on with Goethe and Charles August, grand-duke of Saxe-Weimar, was collected and published at Weimar by Schade in 1856.
DOBREE, PETER PAUL (1782-1825), English classical scholar and critic, was born in Guernsey. He was educated at Reading school under Richard Valpy and at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was elected fellow. He was appointed regius professor of Greek in 1823, and died in Cambridge on the 24th of September 1825. He was an intimate friend of Porson, whom he took as his model in textual criticism, although he showed less caution in conjectural emendation. After Porson’s death (1808) Dobree was commissioned with Monk and Blomfield to edit his literary remains, which had been bequeathed to Trinity College. Illness and a subsequent journey to Spain delayed the work until 1820, when Dobree brought out the Plutus of Aristophanes (with his own and Porson’s notes) and all Porson’s Aristophanica. Two years later he published the Lexicon of Photius from Porson’s transcript of the Gale MS. in Trinity College library, to which he appended a Lexicon rhetoricum from the margin of a Cambridge MS. of Harpocration. James Scholefield, his successor in the Greek professorship, brought out selections from his notes (Adversaria, 1831-1833) on Greek and Latin authors (especially the orators), and a reprint of the Lexicon rhetoricum, together with notes on inscriptions (1834-1835). The latest edition of the Adversaria is by William Wagner (in Bohn’s Collegiate Series, 1883).
An appreciative estimate of Dobree as a scholar will be found in J. Bake’s Scholica hypomnemata, ii. (1839) and in the Philological Museum, i. (1832) by J. C. Hare.