54 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 



Wohler had apparently no connection with medicine or pharmacy, 

 but Liebig was a pharmaceutical apprentice for one year, Frankland a 

 druggist's assistant, Dumas, Schorlemmer, and even Wilhelmy, who 

 investigated the kinetics of sugar hydrolysis, were pharmacists. Gmelin, 

 Mitscherlich, Wurtz, and Cannizzaro studied medicine ; even in the 

 present century medically qualified professors of general chemistry 

 survived (Crum Brown, Emerson Eeynolds). The pharmacists soon 

 found a special field of research in alkaloids, essential oils, and other 

 products of the materia medica. Within a few years of the recognition 

 of the first organic base, morphine, by the German pharmacist Sertiirner, 

 a dozen alkaloids had been discovered, mostly in France, by Pelletier 

 and Caventou, professors at the Ecole de Pharmacie. It is presumably 

 due to this institution, and to the high standard of pharmaceutical 

 education in France that the scientific output of French pharmacists has 

 been so long maintained. For recent times we may refer to Bourquelot, 

 professor at the Ecole de Pharmacie, and to Charles and Georges Tanret, 

 father and son, both practical pharmacists, who not only made important 

 contributions to our knowledge of drugs but also to that of sugars. In 

 Germany contributions of pharmacists to organic chemistry were of less 

 importance, compared with the great developments in university research, 

 inaugurated by Liebig and fostered by the German states. In Britain 

 the state did very little for the universities and nothing for pharmaceutical 

 teaching ; although British pharmacists have the exclusive legal right to 

 call themselves ' chemists ' the state has not helped them to justify the title. 

 At first the British themselves contributed little to organic chemistry ; of 

 the pioneers Faraday, Frankland, Perkin, and Williamson, only two were 

 teachers. The sojourn of Hofmann in London, from 1845-1865, from the 

 age of twenty-seven to that of forty-seven, was of the greatest influence 

 on the development of organic chemistry in England, but it did not 

 lead to biological applications. Particularly through the inauguration of 

 the dye industry, by Hofmann' s pupil, Perkin, and Mansfield, attention 

 was directed to practical problems. The determining factor in Hofmann's 

 decision to return to Germany as professor at Berlin is stated to have 

 been the more idealistic attitude towards science of German students, 

 in contrast to the practical sense of his English pupils, who desired 

 knowledge of a more utilitarian kind. Germany was not yet industrialised, 

 and the insistence on research in her universities favoured ' Natur- 

 forschung ' and the study of products of vegetable and animal origin. 

 Characteristically, Liebig's practical applications of chemistry to agricul- 

 ture seem to have attracted more attention in Britain than in his own 

 country. But in physiological chemistry Germany began to lead the 

 way, as witnessed by the foundation of Maly's Jahresbericht iiher die 

 Fortschritte der Tierchemie (1871) and of Hoppe-Seyler's Zeitschrift fur 

 physiologische Chemie (1877). The latter remained for a generation the 

 only journal exclusively devoted to the new border line subject and even 

 now is perhaps more largely concerned with organic chemistry than its 

 contemporaries . 



German organic chemists investigated not only substances such as 

 alkaloids, colouring matters, and terpenes, which are mostly restricted 

 to a few species, but systematically studied whole classes of biologically 



