262 JUSTUS VON LIEBIG. 
were more like kitchens filled with all sorts of furnaces and utensils for 
the carrying out of metallurgical or pharmaceutical processes. No one 
really understood how to teach it. 
| afterwards followed Kastner to Erlangen, where he had promised 
to analyze some minerals with me; but unfortunately he did not him. 
self know how to do it, and he never carried out a single analysis 
with me. 
The benefit which I gained through intercourse with other students 
during my sojourn in Bonn and Erlangen was the discovery of my 
ignorance in very many subjects which they brought with them from 
school to the university, and since I got nothing to do in chemistry I 
laid out all my energies to make up for my previously neglected school 
studies. 
In Bonn and Erlangen small numbers of students joined with me in 
a chemico-physical union, in which every member in turn had to read a 
paper on the question of the day, which, of course, consisted merely in 
a report on the subjects of the essays which appeared monthly in Gil- 
bert’s Annalen and Schweigger’s Journal. 
In Erlangen, Schelling’s lectures attracted me for a time, but Schell- 
ing possessed no thorough knowledge in the province of natural science, 
and the dressing up of natural phenomena with analogies and in images, 
which was called exposition, did not suit me. 
[returned to Darmstadt fully persuaded that I could not attain my 
ends in Germany. 
The dissertations of Berzelius—that is to say, thebetter translation 
of his handbook, which had a large circulation at that time—were as 
springs in the desert. 
Mitscherlich, H. Rose, Woéhler, and Magnus had then repaired to Ber- 
zelius, in Stockholm; but Paris offered me means of instruction in many 
other branches of natural science, as, for instance, physies, such as could 
be found united in no other place. I made up my mind to go to Paris. 
IT was then seventeen and a-half years old. My journey to Paris, the way 
and manner in which I came in contact with Thenard, Humboldt, 
Dulong, and with Gay-Lussac, and how the boy found favor in the sight 
of those men, borders on the fabulous, and would be out of place here. 
Since then it has frequently been my experience that marked talent 
awakens in all men, I believe I may say without exception, an irre- 
pressible desire to bring about its development. Each helps in his own 
way, and all together as if they were acting in concert; but talent only 
compels success if it is united with a firm indomitable will. External 
hindrances to its development are in most cases very much less than 
those which lie in men themselves; for just as no one of the forces of 
nature, however mighty it may be, ever produces an effect by itself 
alone, but always only in conjunction with other forces, so a man can 
only make valuable that which he learns without trouble, or acquires 
readily, for which as we say, he has a natural gift, if he learns 
