50 
by the action of the water and a ferment (common to both sweet 
and hitter almonds), breaks up into sugar, prussic acid, and hitter- 
almond oil. They also succeeded in separating the prussic acid 
from the distilled oil, and found the thus purified oil to he a non- 
poisonous liquid of the composition C 7 1I 6 0. This liquid, when 
exposed to the air, readily takes up oxygen and assumes the form 
of a solid which is identical, at the same time, with the quasi- 
stearoptene of the oil and with Scheele’s benzoic acid C 7 H 6 0 2 . 
When treated with chlorine the purified oil yields a chloride 
C 7 H 5 Q . Cl; the chlorine of which, by treatment with the respective 
potassium compounds, is displaced by its equivalent in bromine, 
iodine, sulphur, cyanogen, and, on treatment with ammonia, by the 
group 1STH 2 . Water converts it into hydrochloric and benzoic 
acids. In all these reactions the group C 7 H 5 0 holds together, it 
moves forwards and backwards as if it were a compound element. 
A common-place enough fact in the eyes of the chemical student of 
1882, but a most wonderful revelation to the chemist of 1832. 
Berzelius, who certainly was not much given to dealing in super- 
latives, greeted the discovery in his Jahresbericht as opening up a 
new era in organic chemistry, and, rejecting the prosaic name of 
benzoyl which Wohler and Liebig had given to their radical, pro- 
posed to name it proine or orthrine, from 77 -pa/t the beginning of 
the day, or orthrine, from opOpos the dawn of the morning. 
It is part of the glory of the two men that, in regard to none of 
their joint researches, the outer world ever had any hint given to it as 
to what was the one’s and what was the other’s share in the work 
although they rarely worked together in the same laboratory, 
Wohler would work away in Gottingen and Liebig in Giessen; 
they only compared notes and slumped the whole into one memoir. 
Going by what we know of the genius of the two great men, we 
should say that in the benzoyl research Liebig’s hand is more 
distinctly visible, while the one on uric acid (published 1837) 
impresses one as having more of the Wohler element in it. 
Uric acid was discovered by Scheele in 1776. It is a constant 
component of urine, but more readily prepared from the excre- 
ment of birds and serpents. Its general properties and its rela- 
tions to bases are all that was known of it when Liebig and 
Wohler took it in hand. Apart from an isolated observation of 
