50 life's beginning on the earth 



A short time later the faculty meets to decide on the final 

 grades and promotion of the pupils. They decide to drop 

 Justus Liebig, and his home-room teacher moves to expel 

 him saying that he is a detriment to the school; the motion 

 is passed. 



Justus Liebig, however, far from being discouraged by 

 this verdict stuck to his plan to become a chemist. He 

 was disgusted with the antiquated classical studies, as 

 practiced in European schools for centuries. He knew, far 

 better than his teacher, that the thoughtless repetition of 

 meaningless phrases led nowhere; he sought and found new 

 ways to the truth: the experimentation in a chemical 

 laboratory. 



But in those days hardly any scientific chemical labora- 

 tories existed anywhere in Europe, except in Paris. There 

 the immortal Lavoisier had imbued the old alchemy with 

 a new spirit. He had shown that a burning flame consumed 

 a part of the air, the oxygen, and that it was not merely a 

 volatilization of something contained in the burning sub- 

 stance, as had been postulated by the old phlogiston 

 theory. This knowledge was acquired by introducing scale 

 and weights for the study of chemical problems. Facts 

 known for centuries acquired a new importance after these 

 investigations. 



Lavoisier fell a victim of the French Revolution in 1794, 

 but his work was carried on by a large group of pupils. A 

 school of thought and experimentation developed in Paris 

 through which France was undoubtedly dominant in chem- 

 istry for half a century, as expressed in a well-known old 

 statement: "Chemistry is a French science founded by 

 Monsieur Lavoisier." 



Justus Liebig devoted himself to the study of chemistry 

 at first in Bonn, Germany, but found little satisfaction in 

 studying the obsolete chemical methods taught there. He 

 saw that the right kind of chemical training was available 



