104 : GERMAN SCIENCE 
return, Each word of his carried instruction, every intonation 
of his voice bespoke regard; his approval was a mark of 
honour, and of whatever else we might be proud, our greatest 
pride was in having him for a master,’ 
Liebig was also a great popularizer of science, His ‘ Letters 
on Chemistry’, originally contributed to a newspaper and 
ultimately collected in a volume, probably did more to extend 
a knowledge of the meaning and possibilities of chemistry 
among the intelligent public of Germany than anything that 
has appeared before or since. They dissipated the notion, 
still lingeriug so strongly and persistently in this country, 
that chemistry is a remote and mysterious study, which, except 
in relation to drugs and the making of analyses, has little to 
yield to material needs and nothing to touch the finer instincts 
~ of humanity. 
I think you will understand how the influence of Liebig 
and his pupils served to permeate Germany with a real sense 
of the interest and importance of chemical science. Centres 
of experimental science arose everywhere ; the universities 
reformed their ways. Those of his pupils who became the 
heads of industrial concerns found themselves, as he said, with 
a new point of view, a new attitude of mind, with new weapons, 
with new means of progress, They came to see that things 
did not merely happen, that there were unseen but discoverable 
causes, that a knowledge of causes gave the power of control, 
of variation, of improvement, of initiation. They had gained 
all this, not by the narrow pursuit of specialized know- 
ledge, but by whole-hearted and disinterested study in 
whatever corner of the unknown they were brought by the 
master mind of a true philosopher to trace the operation of 
Te A ay or eget ti 
— 
natural laws and to carry their quest to the utmost inwardness — 
of things. 
It was this conception of science that got about in educated — 
Germany as it has never done in any other country, and it is 
