GERMAN SCIENCE 97 
facilitate the progress of science. ‘The cause of this state 
of things is, however, not difficult to understand. Most of 
our statesmen have brought from their youth no impression, 
no insight in regard to science. There was in their day no 
real science taught. Chemistry was regarded as the handmaid 
of medicine, to prepare drugs for the physician. Apart from 
the pharmacist, the science had no existence. The humanistic 
studies, languages, have with us at all times had the pre- 
ponderance. They it is which have imbued a whole nation 
with vanity and conceit about things which stand in no kind 
of relation to the organic life of the state.’ 
After bitter reflections on the extravagances and pedantries 
of the learned scholars and the disastrous effect on pupils 
whose aim becomes merely to ape their masters, Liebig goes 
on to say: ‘Humanistic studies have become not a means 
of forming the mind, languages not the keys to the thoughts 
of lofty spirits of the past, but a sort of fetish in themselves. 
‘In the learned German journals you will find that for 
ninety-nine pedagogical or philosophical essays there is 
perhaps a single scientific writing. Everybody with any 
claim to culture understands the ninety-nine, but the science 
remains a hieroglyph.’ He then extols science for the light 
it sheds on the realm of Nature in which we live, for the 
impress it makes upon the mind, ‘giving a new sense which 
permits man to discern innumerable wonders which to another 
remain hidden and invisible. He recounts the great con- 
sequences of Newton’s discoveries and explains how by the 
progress of chemistry revolutionary industrial and economic 
changes have been effected. And yet ‘Prussia, a country 
in the highest state of culture and intelligence, has no place 
where the physiologist, the geognost, the physician, the 
industrialist, the physicist, can learn and become familiar 
with, the language of natural phenomena. In Prussia there 
exist no chemical laboratories. The youth are debarred 
2461 N 
