448 
and then Hofmann and Kolbe and Frese- 
nius; perhaps to these we should add Ke- 
kulé, who followed ten years later. Woh- 
ler brought to Germany the chemical power 
and intellect of the Swede Berzelius; Liebig 
the brilliancy of the French school, where 
Gay-Lussac, Vauquelin, Thénard, Dulong, 
Chevreul and other successors of the 
‘ Father of Chemistry ’ were full of activity. 
Wohler, at Gottingen, and Liebig, at Gies- 
sen, became the progenitors of the German 
school. Bunsen and Kolbe were Gottingen 
boys, Hofmann and Fresenius (and we 
might add Kopp) were born at Giessen, 
while Kekulé was a youth in Bunsen’s 
laboratory. This band of men were not 
merely discoverers of chemical fact and 
theory; they were the discoverers of men. 
Hardly a chemist of note to-day in Ger- 
many or England or America, who has 
passed young manhood, but has felt the 
direct impress of one or another of these 
men. They have been the world’s teachers 
of chemistry, and to-day how many teachers 
are using their personal recollections of 
these their own instructors to inspire the 
next generation of pupils. 
And now the last of these giants is gone. 
Liebig was the first to be taken, just round- 
ing out his three score years and ten. A 
decade later and Wohlerand Kolbe passed. 
The last ten years have seen the death of 
Hofmann, Kekulé, Fresenius and now, at 
the close of the century, a few months only 
before the hundredth anniversary of W6h- 
ler’s birth, Bunsen is dead. 
The outward incident of Bunsen’s life is 
quickly told. Robert Wilhelm. Bunsen, the 
son of a distinguished theologian, was born 
at Gottingen, March 31,1811. In 1831 he 
was graduated at the University of Gottin- 
gen as Ph.D., and after some study at 
Paris, Berlin and Vienna he was appointed 
Privatdocent and then assistant professor at 
Gottingen. In 1836 he succeeded Wohler 
at the Polytechnic School at Cassel, and in 
SCIENCE. 
[N. 8. Von. X. No. 248. 
1838 was appointed professor of chemistry 
at Marburg. Here he remained for several 
years, went to Breslau for a short time, 
when he was called in 1851 to Heidel- 
berg. Here he remained active till 1889, 
when he resigned from service; but he 
still retained all his old interest in the 
chemical laboratory. Sometime before re- 
signing, he received a very urgent call to 
the University of Berlin, but he was un- 
willing to change his home in his old age. 
He died at Heidelberg, August 16, 1899. 
Few honors which fall to the lot of chemists 
but were bestowed upon him. In 1858 he 
was elected foreign member of the Royal 
Society ; in 1883, one of the eight foreign as- 
sociates of the French Academy of Sciences. 
He received from the Royal Society in 1860 
its Copley medal, and in 1877 he and his 
associate Kirchhoff were joint recipients of 
the newly-founded Davy medal. 
Bunsen was a broad chemist, confining 
his work to no one branch of the chemical 
field. He was equally at home in theory 
and in practice, and perhaps his most im- 
portant work consisted in laying founda- 
tions on which others should erect the 
superstructure. He would hardly be called 
a prolific writer, and yet he is credited with 
more than a hundred articles, of most of 
which he was the sole author. 
His first published work was in 1834 
and consisted of a short note in the Journal 
de Pharmacie calling attention to the value 
of ferric oxid (hydrated peroxid of iron) as 
an antidote for arsenic poisoning. This 
was the beginning of his work on arsenic, 
from which he was to receive great reputa- 
tion, but from which also he was to nearly 
lose his life. He could not, have better 
shown his pluck and enthusiasm than by 
attacking the dangerous problem of the or- 
ganic compounds of arsenic. It was a 
theme which has cost more than one chem- 
ist his life, but it was of great importance 
in Liebig’s work on the ‘radical theory.’ 
