92 BIOGRAPHIES OF SCIENTIFIC MEN 



them) : it may easily be imagined how fatal such a 

 practice was to the graces of elocution. Goethe alludes 

 to it in Faust : 



Doch euch des Schreibens ja befleisst 

 Als dictirt "euch der Heilig" Geist. 



It may be mentioned that many parts of Faust are 

 unintelligible to the reader who knows nothing of German 

 university life. 



During this period he studied natural science, and 

 his progress was marked with such success that he was 

 granted a pension or scholarship by the Grand Duke of 

 Hesse- Darmstadt, which enabled him to continue his 

 studies and researches. Liebig went to Paris in 1823. 

 Having communicated a paper on fulminic acid to the 

 Academic des Sciences, he was introduced to Alexander 

 von Humboldt, Gay-Lussac, and other savants then living 

 in the French capital. Liebig became a pupil in the 

 laboratory of the famous chemist Gay-Lussac, discoverer 

 of the law of volume. At the beginning of the nineteenth 

 century there were only a few chemists in Germany, and 

 this was the reason that he went to Paris. 



In the same year that Liebig went to France, he 

 began to perfect the method of organic or combustion 

 analysis. The principle of the method is the one now 

 used for determining the carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen in 

 organic compounds. The compound is heated with copper 

 oxide in a glass tube, and the carbon and hydrogen are 



