JUSTUS VON LIEBIG. 261 
the water rises in the mine when the brooks 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 chemistry; it was gen- 
erally 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 anat- 
omy, 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, Wollaston, Biot, Arago, 
Fresnel, Thenard, and Dulong opened up entirely new spheres of inves- 
tigation, 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 directions. The national spirit had asserted its freedom and 
independence in ideal spheres, and by the destruction of belief in 
authority had brought rich blessings in many ways,—for example, in 
medicine and philosophy; only in physiology it had broken through 
its natural limits and wandered far beyond experience. 
The goal of sciefice and the fact that it has value only when it is use- 
ful 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 edu- 
sated person, to believe that in the body of a living being the crude and 
vulgar inorganic forces played any part. Life and all its manifesta- 
tions 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 instrue- 
tion in chemistry was all but extinct at the universities, and only the 
highly-educated pharmacists, Klaproth, Hermbstiidt, Valentin Rose, 
Trommsdorftf, 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 analysis was 
imparted, existed nowhere at that time. What passed by that name 
