A HISTORY OF METABOLISM 57 



Nor was the development of German science ignored in England, for 

 Matthew Arnold wrote in 1868: "Petty towns have a university whose 

 teaching is famous throughout Europe, and the King of Prussia and 

 Count Bismarck resist the loss of a great savant from Prussia as they 

 would resist a political check." 



Let us not forget the environmental conditions under which men like 

 Liebig may be fostered and developed. 



Bidder, F. W. (1810-1894) and Schmidt, C. (born 1822). In order 

 to complete the story of Liebig's life this history has been diverted from 

 its chronological sequence, and it is now necessary to tell of the activity 

 of the period essentially coincident with the date of the publications of 

 Regnault and Eeiset. At the same time that these men were at work 

 in Paris, Bidder and Schmidt (a) were active in the German university 

 established at Dorpat in Russia. In 1852 they published their book, 

 "Die Verdauungssafte und der Stoffwechsel." Voit often referred to 

 this book as a veritable mine of information. The book, however, has 

 never been as well known as it should be. The statement still found 

 in textbooks on physiology that the influence of food upon the bile flow 

 has never been investigated finds its refutation in this volume, published 

 in the middle of the last century. Here, also, one finds the method of 

 computing the metabolism used by those who employed the Pettenkofer- 

 Voit respiration apparatus. 



Bidder and Schmidt were much more profoundly influenced by the 

 doctrines of Liebig than were Regnault and Reiset. Had the methods of 

 the four investigators been combined, much of value would probably have 

 been rapidly uncovered. But Reiset's publication of 1868 on the metabol- 

 ism of farm animals shows no knowledge of the publication of Bidder and 

 Schmidt. To promote science one must know of contemporaneous activi- 

 ties in many lands, as well as of the older historical happenings. 



C. Schmidt, who had been a pupil of Liebig and Wohler, began work 

 six years before (1845) the completion of the combined work of Bidder 

 and Schmidt. Schmidt had planned an experimental critique of the 

 metabolism of the higher vertebrates. His idea was to study in a few 

 typical forms the following main factors : oxygen absorption, carbonic acid 

 and urea elimination and the energy statistics of fasting animals, ac- 

 complished upon the same individual under identical conditions. Having 

 accumulated this mass of observations concerning the typical intensity of 

 the respiration and the protein consumption on the more prominent types 

 of vertebrates, it was planned to investigate in similar fashion the size 

 of the intermediary metabolism, the effect of external temperature and 

 the effect of partaking of protein, fat and carbohydrate, and then to 

 reduce the sum total of all the observations to a systematic whole. 



It was beyond the power of a single individual to accomplish this 

 plan. A preliminary investigation established the specificity of the 



