48 
direction incidentally — with his left hand, so to say, while his right 
was engaged in greater work — amounts to a great deal. With the 
two exceptions of Heinrich Eose and Kohert Bunsen, no man has 
done more than Wohler has for the perfection of analytical methods. 
The analysis of meteorites was one of his favourite specialties, and 
one of his results in regard to these must not be withheld from a 
Scottish Society. We refer to his discovery of organic matter in a 
meteorite which he examined in 1864. 
If Wohler had done nothing more than what has been referred 
to explicitly or implicitly in the above, his work, even for the fifty 
years of unbroken health which Providence granted him for its 
execution, w T ould have to he admitted to he both mutta and mullum ; 
hut far more important than even all that are his researches in 
organic chemistry. 
Wohler’s first organic research dates from 1821, when (as a 
student in Heidelberg) he discovered persulphocyanic acid, a 
compound of sulphur with the sulphocyanic acid which, the year 
before, had been analysed by Berzelius. But fraught with greater 
consequences was his discovery of cyanic acid in 1822. Organic 
chemistry might be said to date from it in two senses. When, in 
1828, Wohler prepared the amnionic salt of his acid, he was 
astonished to find that the salt, although made by what appeared 
to be a straight-forward double decomposition, did not exhibit the 
character of an ammonia salt at all, but turned out to be identical 
with urea, a substance which heretofore had been known only as 
one of the organic components of urine. A momentous discovery 
for that time I A wide and impassable gulf then, in the minds of 
chemists, separated the mineral from the organic kingdom. In 
organic bodies all appeared to be derivable from their elements by 
a succession of acts of binary combination ; the full analysis of such 
a body contained in itself the full instruction for its synthetical 
production in the laboratory. Organic substances, on the other 
hand, were supposed to be things of an entirely different order; 
in them the few elements which they all consist of, were assumed 
to be united with one another, each with each, in a mysterious 
manner, which could be brought about only by the agency of vital 
force. Vital force, it was now seen, had nothing to do with the 
formation of urea at any rate. The gulf was bridged over, and a 
