49 
great and new morning full of the highest promise dawned over 
chemistry. If the promise was more than fulfilled, if organic 
chemistry from a mere possibility developed into a reality, we owe 
this chiefly to the great researches which were carried out conjointly 
by Wohler and Liebig. 
Two years after Wohler had discovered cyanic acid, Liebig and 
Gay-Lussac inquired into the nature of that dangerously explosive 
compound known as fulminate of mercury (which had been dis- 
covered twenty-four years before by Howard), and proved it to be the 
mercuric salt of an acid which, although clearly a thing of its own 
kind, had precisely the same elementary composition as Wohler’s 
cyanic acid, a result which, at that time, appeared hardly credible. 
These doubts, however, were set to rest by a joint investigation on 
the oxygenated acids of cyanogen, which Liebig and Wohler pub- 
lished in 1830. In their research they proved, both analytically 
and synthetically, that cyanic and cyanuric acid, although distinct 
bodies, have the same elementary composition, and that the former, 
when simply kept in a sealed-up tube, gradually passes ivholly into 
a porcelain-like neutral solid, cy am elide, which is widely different 
from either. By these discoveries, and by Wohler’s synthesis of 
urea, the fact of isomerism was firmly established. Compared with 
this great conquest their joint work on mellitic acid (1830), and on 
sulphovinic acid (1831), appears small ; it sinks into insignificance 
when viewed in the light of their immortal researches on bitter 
almond oil and on uric acid. 
In 1832 bitter-almond oil was supposed to be to bitter almonds 
what a hundred and one other essential oils are to their vegetable 
sources. Of its chemistry nothing was known except the fact that 
it contains loosely combined prussic acid, and that, when kept for a 
long time, it is liable to deposit a crystalline solid, as various other 
essential oils do. Liebig and Wohler, being struck by the absence 
from even powdered bitter almonds of the intense smell charac- 
teristic of the oil, set about tracing the latter to its origin, and soon 
solved the question. In 1830 Robiquet and Boutron-Charlard had 
succeeded in extracting from bitter almonds a crystalline nitrogenous 
solid, soluble without decomposition in alcohol and in water, which 
they called amygdaline. What Liebig and Wohler found, was that 
when bitter-almond meal is mashed up with water, this amygdaline, 
d 
