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 



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