638 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XII. No. 304. 



the great pioneers in qualitative and quan- 

 titative analytical chemistry. 



By the labors of the great experimenters 

 whom I have mentioned qualitative analy- 

 sis gradually acquired the familiar appear- 

 ance of to-day, and many books vpere verit- 

 ten ■with the object of arranging the mass 

 of information which had accumulated, and 

 of thus rendering it available for the stu- 

 dent in his efforts to investigate the com- 

 position of new minerals and other sub- 

 stances. Among these books may be men- 

 tioned the ' Handbuch der analytischen 

 Chemie,' by H. Eose, and especially the 

 well-known analytical text-books of Fres- 

 enius, which have had an extraordinarily 

 wide circulation and passed through many 

 editions. 



The work of the great pioneers in analyt- 

 ical chemistry was work done often under 

 circumstances of great difficulty, as before 

 the end of the seventeenth century there 

 were no public institutions of any sort in 

 which a practical knowledge of chemistry 

 could be acquired. Lectures were, of course, 

 given from very early times, but it was not 

 until the time of Guillaume Frangois Rou- 

 elle (1703-1770), at the beginning of the 

 eighteenth century, that lectures began to 

 be illustrated by experiments. Eouellei 

 who was very active as a teacher, num- 

 bered among his pupils many men of emi- 

 nence, such as Lavoisier and Proust, and it 

 was largely owing to his influence that 

 France took such a lead in practical teach- 

 ing. In Germany progress was much 

 slower, and in our country the introduc- 

 tion of lectures illustrated by experiments 

 seems to have been mainly due to Davy. 



When it is considered how slowly experi- 

 mental work came to be recognized as a 

 means of illustration and education, even 

 in connection with lectures, it is not sur- 

 prising that in early times practical teaching 

 in laboratories should have been thought 

 quite unnecessarj'. 



The few laboratories which existed in the 

 sixteenth century were built mainly for the 

 practice of alchemy by the reigning princes 

 of the time, and, indeed, up to the begin- 

 ning of the nineteenth century, the private 

 laboratories of the great masters were the 

 only schools in which a favored few might 

 study, but which were not open to the pub- 

 lic. Thus we find that Berzelius received 

 in his laboratory a limited number of stu- 

 dents who worked mostly at research : these 

 were not usually young men, and his school 

 cannot thus be considered as a teaching in- 

 stitution in the ordinary sense of the word. 



The earliest laboratory open for general 

 instruction in Great Britain was that of 

 Thomas Thomson, who after graduating in 

 Edinburgh in 1799, began lecturing in that 

 city in 1800, and opened a laboratory for 

 the practical instruction of his pupils. 

 Thomson was appointed lecturer in Chem- 

 istry in Glasgow University in 1807, and 

 Regius Professor in 1818, and in Glasgow 

 he also opened a general laboratory. 



The first really great advance in labora- 

 tory teaching is due to Liebig, who, after 

 working for some years in Paris under Gay- 

 Lussac, was appointed in 1824 to be Pro- 

 fessor of Chemistry in Giessen. Liebig was 

 strongly impressed with the necessity for 

 public institutions where any student could 

 study chemistry, and to him fell the honor 

 of founding the world-famed Giessen Lab- 

 oratory, the first public institution in Ger- 

 many which brought practical chemistry 

 within the reach of all students. 



Giessen rapidly became the center of 

 chemical interest in Germany, and students 

 flocked to the laboratory in such numbers 

 as to necessitate the development of a sys- 

 tematic course of practical chemistry, and 

 in this way a scheme of teaching was de- 

 vised which, as we shall see later, has 

 served as the foundation for the system of 

 practical chemistry in use at the present 

 day. 



