August 7, 1914] 



SCIENCE 



181 



The Germans were soon to make up for 

 lost time. Those same German universities 

 which, when Liebig was a young man, were 

 so poorly equipped for the study of chem- 

 istry, were now enthusiastically at work on 

 research along the newer developments of 

 the physical sciences, and, before long, the 

 former pupils of France, in their turn, be- 

 came teachers of the world. 



Liebig had inaugurated for the chemical 

 students working under him his system of 

 research laboratories ; however modest these 

 laboratories may have been at that time, 

 they carried bodily the study of chemistry 

 from pedagogic boresomeness into a capti- 

 vating cross-examination of nature. 



And it seemed as if nature had been 

 waiting impatiently to impart some of her 

 secrets to the children of men, who for so 

 many generations had tried to settle truth 

 and knowledge by words and oratory and 

 by brilliant displays of metaphysical con- 

 troversies. 



Indeed, at that time, a few kitchen tables, 

 some clumsy glass-ware, a charcoal furnace 

 or two, some pots and pans, and a modest 

 balance were all that was needed to make 

 nature give her answers. 



These modest paraphernalia, eloquent 

 by their very simplicity, brought forth 

 rapidly succeeding discoveries. One of 

 them was truly sensational: Liebig and 

 Wohler succeeded in accomplishing the 

 direct synthesis of urea; thinking men 

 began to realize the far-reaching import of 

 this revolutionary discovery whereby a 

 purely organic substance had been created 

 in the laboratory by starting exclusively 

 from inorganic materials. This result up- 

 set all respected doctrines that organic 

 substances are of a special enigmatic con- 

 stitution, altogether different from inor- 

 ganic or mineral compounds, and that they 

 only could be built up by the agency of 



the so-caUed "vital force" — whatever that 

 might mean. 



Keseareh in organic chemistry became 

 more and more fascinating; all available 

 organic substances were being investigated 

 one after another by restless experi- 

 mentalists. 



Coal-tar, heretofore a troublesome by- 

 product of gas manufacture, notwithstand- 

 ing its uninviting, iU-smeUing, black sticky 

 appearance, did not escape the general 

 inquisitive tendency; some of its constitu- 

 ents, like benzol or others, were isolated 

 and studied. 



Under the brilliant leadership of Kekule, 

 a successful attempt was made to correlate 

 the rapidly increasing new experimental 

 observations in organic chemistry into a 

 new theory which would try to explain all 

 the numerous facts; a theory which became 

 the sign-post to the roads of further 

 achievements. 



The discovery of quickly succeeding 

 processes for making from coal-tar deriv- 

 atives numerous artificial dyes, rivaling, if 

 not surpassing, the most brilliant colors of 

 nature, made the group of bold investi- 

 gators stm bolder. Research in organic 

 chemistry began to find rapid rewards; 

 entirely new and successful industries 

 based on purely scientific data were spring- 

 ing up in England and France, as well as 

 in Germany. 



Some wide-awake leaders of these new 

 enterprises, more particularly in Germany, 

 soon learned that they were never ham- 

 pered by too much knowledge, but that, 

 on the contrary, they were almost continu- 

 ously handicapped in their impatient on- 

 ward march by insufficient knowledge, or 

 by misleading conceptions, if not by incor- 

 rect published facts. 



This is precisely where the study of 

 organic chemistry received its greatest 

 stimulating influence and soon put Ger- 



