SKETCH OF AUGUST KEKULE. 401 



is very common to see farmers put guano on a soil begging for 

 potash, and then heap execration on the head of the dealer who sold 

 the guano when the crop failed. To revert to a simile used above, a 

 captain must not blame the salt pork for scurvy. 



The other way to buy and use fertilizers is to ascertain what a 

 certain crop needs; then find out whether these be in the soil, and to 

 what extent. With these data the deficiency may be made good with- 

 out the wasteful cost of the former method. State and Federal De- 

 partments of Agriculture furnish their aid freely and gladly, and 

 already the signs are seen of the day when agriculture will take its 

 place among the semiexact sciences, and the present haphazard 

 methods will become obsolete. 



SKETCH OF AUGUST KEKULE. 



THIS news," said Herr H. Landrelt, president, announcing 

 Kekule's death in the German Chemical Society at Berlin, 

 " will be received with sorrow not only by our society but by the 

 whole chemical world. Science has again lost one of its greatest 

 representatives, one of those extremely rare spirits who were called 

 upon to found a new epoch in it and push it mightily forward." 



Friedeich August Kekule was born at Darmstadt, September 

 7, 1829, and died, after a long illness, at Bonn, July 13, 1896. He 

 was originally destined by his father for the profession of an archi- 

 tect; and some houses, he told his students in a festival address, still 

 existed (in 1892) in Darmstadt of which he drew the plans when, a 

 youth, he was attending the gymnasium. The leading events of his 

 life were very tersely told by himself in an address responding to an 

 ovation from the students of the University of Bonn on the twenty- 

 fifth anniversary of his professorship there; a translation of which, 

 from the Kolnische Zeitung, was published by Mr. J. E. Martin in 

 Nature, June 30, 1892. 



At Giessen, he said, where he went to study architecture, he 

 attended Liebig's lectures, and was thereby attracted to chemistry. 

 But his relatives would not at first hear of his changing his profession, 

 and he was given a half-year's grace to think over it. He spent his 

 time in the Polytechnicum at Darmstadt. His first teacher in chem- 

 istry at Darmstadt was Moldenhauer, the inventor of lucifer matches. 

 His leisure time was spent in modeling in plaster and at the lathe. 

 He was then permitted to return to Giessen. " I attended," he said, 

 " the lectures, first of Will and then of Liebig. Liebig was at work 

 on a new edition of his letters on Chemistry, for which many ex- 



YOL. LIV. 29 



