THE PROGRESS OF SCIENCE 



6i5 



THE PEOGEESS OF SCIENCE 



JUSTUS TON LIEBIG AND THE 

 FIRST LABORATORY 

 It has been necessary to wait a long 

 while for a biography of Justus von 

 Liebig, but it has now appeared from 

 the competent hand of Professor Jakob 

 Volhard, of Halle, a chemist of distinc- 

 tion, known also as the biographer of 

 A. W. Hofmann. Liebig and Volhard's 

 father were school friends; the young 

 Volhard was treated almost as a child 

 in Liebig's family; later he was his 

 assistant at Munich and succeeded him 

 in some of his lectures. The biography 

 appears in two large volumes from the 

 publishing house of Barth and contains, 

 in addition to a full personal narrative, 

 an extended account of Liebig's re- 

 searches in organic chemistry. 



As has often happened in the case of 

 those who have become eminent in sci- 

 ence, Liebig's father — a dealer in drugs 

 — was enjjaffed in work which influ- 



enced the interests of the son; his 

 mother was a woman of character; he 

 was backward in his school studies, but 

 made rapid advances when permitted to 

 take up his chosen work, so that he 

 received his doctor's degree at the age 

 of nineteen and an assistant professor- 

 ship at the age of twenty-one; he 

 traveled and studied abroad. 



At the beginning of the last century 

 there was in Germany a remarkable 

 renascence in letters, philosophy and 

 philology, to be followed a little later 

 by the revival which gave the universi- 

 ties their leading place in the advance- 

 ment of the natural and exact sciences. 

 Liebig was born in 1803, and when he 

 studied at the university the sciences 

 were dominated by the philosophy of 

 nature of the post-Kantians. He says 

 that he was robbed of two precious 

 years of his life by the infection. 

 Schelling, whose lectures he heard, was 



Liebig's Laboratory at Giessen. 



