308 Proceedings of the Royal Society 
to the ordinary Professorship of Chemistry, and the Directorship 
of the Chemical Laboratory in the University of Munich. He 
died 18th April 1873, at Munich. 
The time had not yet come for a calm and judicial estimate 
of Liebig’s influence on the progress of chemistry. It must be 
left for future generations of chemists, removed from the direct 
influence of his work, and unbiassed by personal recollection, to 
assign him his proper place among the great leaders of chemical 
thought and investigation. It is, however, possible for us to 
give a general sketch of his career, and to point out some of 
the more prominent effects of his work as seen in the present 
state of the science. 
We may consider him as a teacher of chemistry, as an inventor 
of new means of investigation, as a discoverer of new facts and 
a creator of new ideas in pure chemistry, and as an expounder of 
the relations of chemistry to common life and to the arts. As 
a teacher, he introduced into Gfermany systematic practical train- 
ing in laboratory work, and induced the Darmstadt Government 
to build at Giessen a students’ laboratory, which has served as 
the type of those magnificent scientific laboratories which have 
recently been erected in connection with all the great German 
universities. His stinging attacks upon the great German Govern- 
ments for their neglect of practical scientific education, his own 
success as a teacher, and the zeal for the good cause which he 
imparted to his pupils, have had for their effect the establishment 
throughout Germany of numerous well-equipped and usefully 
active schools of practical science. It is not too much to say 
that there is no school of chemistry in the world which does not 
owe a great part of its usefulness to the example of the Giessen 
laboratory. 
It is unnecessary here to catalogue the improvements in chemical 
apparatus which we owe to Liebig, but there is one invention 
which must at once occur to every chemist as of vital importance 
in the history of the science. Organic analyses were made with 
great accuracy before 1831, but they could be made only by highly 
skilled chemists, and involved great labour and trouble. The 
publication by Liebig, in that year, of his method of organic 
analyses — the method which (with important but secondary improve- 
