516 PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY 



peneti-ation aud judgment that he recognized from the first the insuffi- 

 ciency of this way of teaching, aud turned eagerly to the laboratory 

 naethod, invented by Liebig not many years before, aud brought to 

 the Laboratory of the Lawrence Scientific School by Horsford, a 

 pupil of Liebig, in 1847. The reason for this, Cooke tells us, was 

 that he had taught himself chemistry by experiment. His second 

 great task, the introduction of this laboratory method, proved no easy 

 one. A begiuning was made even in his first year of service as 

 Erving Professor by fitting up a small laboratory in the north end of 

 the cellar of Uuiversity Hall, under the lecture and apjiaratus rooms 

 assigned to the Chemical Department. Here Storer, Eliot, Dean, 

 just home from Wohler's laboratory, and many others, worked as 

 volunteers, but it took seven years of hard fighting to get this course 

 adopted by the College as anytliing but an extx'a. Meanwhile he was 

 striving to improve the regular courses by introducing into the two 

 weekly recitations Stockhardt's Chemistry as the text-book, since 

 this made a first though crude attempt to follow the experimental 

 method of presenting the subject, and by laying great stress on writ- 

 ing reactions, which, to use his own words, "served its purpose in 

 making the study respected in a literary community ; but it did this 

 at the sacrifice of all that is distinctive and peculiarly valuable in the 

 study of an experimental science." This led to the publication of 

 his first book, in 1857, which was a thin volume called " Chemical 

 Problems and Reactions," an admirable manual of tactics for this 

 recitation drill. Amid this arid desert of recitations the weekly lec- 

 ture was the one green spot, as here experimental demonstrations 

 were not only allowed, but required, and yet these lectures were sur- 

 rounded by difficulties before which most men would have given up 

 in despair. The apparatus which he had brought home from Europe 

 was bought for the Medical School; but, as the College had no chem- 

 ical collection, it was obliged to do double duty, and the frequent 

 transportation from Cambi-idge to Boston and from Boston to Cam- 

 bridge of these bulky and fragile pieces of apparatus used up much 

 time and energy, and must have been a constant strain upon his 

 nerves. 



His duties at the Medical School, which at first divided his time 

 with the College, were irksome in the extreme. Chemistry was sys- 

 tematically neglected by the students, and the fact that he held no 

 medical degree caused a certain amount of friction with his colleagues, 

 but nothing could damp his youthful enthusiasm, and laboratory 

 courses in qualitative analysis and medical chemistry were established 



