JUSTUS VON LIEBIG. 659 



which drive the pumps dry up in summer, was, of course, too 

 blunt an explanation for a clever lecture. 



It was then a very wretched time for chemistry in Germany. 

 At most of the universities there was no special chair for chemis- 

 try ; it was generally handed over to the professor of medicine, 

 who taught it, as much as he knew of it, and that was little enough, 

 along with the branches of toxicology, pharmacology, materia 

 medica, practical medicine, and pharmacy. Many years after this 

 in Giessen, descriptive and comparative anatomy, physiology, 

 zoology, natural history, and botany were in one single hand. 



While the labors of the great Swedish chemist, the English 

 and French natural philosophers, Humphry Davy, WoUaston, 

 Biot, Arago, Fresnel, Thenard, and Dulong, opened up entirely 

 new spheres of investigation, all these inestimable acquisitions 

 found no soil in Germany where they could bear fruit. Long 

 years of war had undermined the well-being of the people, and 

 external political pressure had brought in its train the desolation 

 of our universities, filled men with painful anxiety for many 

 years, and turned their desires and their strength in other direc- 

 tions. The national spirit had asserted its freedom and independ- 

 ence in ideal spheres, and by the destruction of belief in authority 

 had brought rich blessings in many ways — for example, in medi- 

 cine and philosophy ; only in physiology it had broken through 

 its natural limits, and wandered far beyond experience. 



The goal of science and the fact that it has value only when it 

 is useful to life had almost dropped out of sight, and men amused 

 themselves in an ideal world which had no connection with the 

 real one. It was considered an almost debasing sentiment, and 

 one unworthy of an educated person, to believe that in the body 

 of a living being the crude and vulgar inorganic forces played 

 any part. Life and all its manifestations and conditions were 

 perfectly clear. Natural phenomena were clothed in bewitchingly 

 lovely dress, cut out and fitted by clever men, and this was called 

 philosophical investigation. Experimental instruction in chem- 

 istry was all but extinct at the universities, and only the high- 

 ly educated pharmacists, Klaproth, Hermbstadt, Valentin Rose, 

 Trommsdorff, and Buchholz, had themselves preserved it, but in 

 another department. 



I remember, at a much later period, Prof. Wurzer, who held 

 the chair of chemistry at Marburg, showing me a wooden table 

 drawer, which had the property of producing quicksilver every 

 three months. He possessed an apparatus which mainly consisted 

 of a long clay pipe-stem, with which he converted oxygen into 

 nitrogen by making the porous pipe-stem red hot in charcoal, and 

 passing oxygen through it. 



Chemical laboratories, in which instruction in chemical anal- 



