120 ILLINOIS ACADEMY OF SCIENCE 
THE PURPOSE OF SCIENCE TEACHING AT A 
UNIVERSITY 
Wiiit1aAM A. Noyes, UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS 
A little more than a century ago shortly after the close of 
the Napoleonic wars, a young German, not out of his teens, 
went to Paris and secured admission to the private laboratory 
of Gay-Lussac. Liebig was a born chemist if ever there was 
one, but even he needed the inspiration of contact with one of 
the master minds in his science. After about a year he re- 
turned to Giessen, Germany, and founded there a laboratory 
which was new of its kind in the world. Liebig’s conception 
of a chemical laboratory was not that of a place where the 
science as already known is taught, so much, as that of a 
work shop where student and teacher work together to find 
something new from the great book of nature. A. W. Hof- 
mann, one of the students of that laboratory, was called by 
Prince Albert to London in 1845 as a Professor in the Royal 
College of Science. Ten years later W. H. Perkin was em- 
ployed by Professor Hofmann to work as an honorary as- 
sistant. Perkin was not yet twenty, but he was so intensely 
interested in his subject that he was not content to work dur- 
ing the day with Hofmann, but fitted up a private laboratory in 
his father’s house where he could work at night. There, in the 
course of some experiments which were begun in an attempt 
to synthesize quinine, he discovered a new coloring matter now 
known as mauve. He conceived the idea that this compound 
could be made commercially and used for dyeing silk and 
other goods. His father had enough faith in the young man 
to furnish him the necessary capital and thus was begun the 
manufacture of the coal tar dyes. It would have been thought 
that with all the initial advantage in England this manufacture 
would have remained in that country, but within a compara- 
tively few years Germany became pre-eminent in the manu- 
facture of dyes and at the beginning of the present war she 
was furnishing three-fourths of all of the artificial dyes used 
in the world. This was almost entirely because the laboratories 
founded after the model which Liebig had set furnished young 
men trained in methods of research, and such young men 
proved to be the ones who were best able to carry the manu- 
facture on to success. 
