LIFE, CARBON'S OUTSTANDING PROPERTY 51 



only in Paris. He went there in 1822, only nineteen years 

 of age, assisted by a recommendation from a leading Ger- 

 man scientist, Alexander v. Humboldt, to the French Pro- 

 fessor of Chemistry, the noted Gay-Lussac. He was ad- 

 mitted to work in Gay-Lussac's private laboratory and soon 

 achieved distinction by a novel and startling discovery 

 concerning the chemical character of fulmic acid, a sub- 

 stance used for initiating explosion of gun powder. His 

 work was published in the papers of foreign scientists of the 

 French Academy, soon also in German, and his fame thus 

 established. Other discoveries followed. 



In the meantime several German universities had con- 

 cluded that a change was desirable in their antiquated 

 methods of teaching chemistry. Seeing the great progress 

 made in France, they desired to adopt the French methods. 

 A man like Liebig, with training in Paris and a successful 

 score of chemical discoveries in his favor, became a much 

 sought candidate. So in 1824, Liebig, only twenty-one 

 years of age, was appointed professor of chemistry at the 

 small University of Giessen, a position he retained for 

 twenty-eight years. Prior to his arrival, Giessen had been 

 an insignificant university; during his activity it acquired 

 world fame as a focus of scientific chemistry. When Liebig 

 finally left in 1852 to accept a call to a bigger university 

 (Munich), Giessen at once dropped back into insignificance. 



The success of Liebig 's teaching and research at Giessen 

 surpassed every previous record, nor has anything like it 

 been achieved since. He scored a long list of epoch-making 

 chemical discoveries, surpassing his French masters. For 

 instance, according to the French methods, weeks and 

 months were required to analyze a single fat, but Liebig 

 invented a new method by which the same analysis can be 

 done in a few hours by two weighings. According to this 

 method, fat is burned. Water and carbon dioxide are 

 formed, the latter being a gas. Water is driven off as a 



