1888, ] 205 (DuBois. 
moth laboratory. To this thoroughly utilitarian end he lookt. How 
fervently he cherisht this thought, how determined he was to accom- 
plish his purpose, may be in some degree inferred from his pushing beyond 
the sea at a time when fashion had not yet conceived the real or nominal 
virtues of an education abroad. He was, indeed, the first American student 
in analytical chemistry who had so ventured into Germany. There being 
no such thing on either side of the Atlantic as a students’ laboratory, he 
spent the year 1833 in Prof. Friedrich Wéhler’s private laboratory in Hesse- * 
Cassel. He next practiced for nine months in the laboratory of Prof. 
Gustav Magnus, at Berlin. The remainder of his three-year term abroad 
was spent in attending lectures in Berlin and in Vienna, and also in visit- 
ing various manufacturing establishments on the Continent and in Eng- 
land. With his return to his native city in the latter part of 1835, or early 
in 1836, we may consider his student or formative period (while he was 
in his twenty-sixth year) to have come to a close. 
Obstacles to progress often become, in the end, the surest means of ad- 
vancement. It was no doubt largely owing to the difficulties which Mr. 
Booth had to surmount that he conceived the educational scheme which 
was the parent of all our existing laboratories for students in applied 
chemistry. With the establishment of his students’ laboratory in 1836 
(which two years ago celebrated its semi-centennial), we may consider 
the second, or teaching period of our subject’s career, to be fairly inau- 
gurated. This, though the shortest of the three, was preéminently the 
creative period of his life. 
I call it creative, because it called into being a method of technical edu- 
cation which has, probably more than anything else, resulted in establish- 
ing chemistry as a factor in commerce, and in gaining for the chemist a 
recognized position in the economy of the world’s work. In fact, the 
students’ laboratory, as instituted by Mr. Booth, bore a relation to mere 
class-room teaching analogous to that which the ‘‘natural method” in 
languages bears to the more bookish method of study by the set rules of 
grammar and rhetoric. ; 
But it was no part of Mr. Booth’s idea to make the laboratory course 
usurp the rightful position of the text-book and the lecture. He saw the 
great want of a supplementer rather than a supplanter. How truly he 
discerned what the scientific as well as the commercial world required, 
and how fully he met that requirement, needs no expansion here. The 
students’ laboratories all over the country—if not beyond—as well as the 
throng of students who have come into and gone from his own laboratory 
during the past half.century—all attest the foresight, the judgment, the 
independence, the energy, of a scientist and a business man. 
But the chemical workshop was not enough. He received an appoint- 
ment from the Franklin Institute as Professor of Chemistry Applied to 
the Arts, in 1836 ; and during the nine successive winters (1836-1845) he 
delivered three courses of lectures, each course occupying three seasons. 
During this period, also, he filled the chair of chemistry (1842-1845) in 
