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diverged. The latter continued to prosecute organic research ; 
the former turned his attention more to inorganic subjects, not 
exclusively though, as the well-known research on narcotine 
(which was carried out in his laboratory, part by himself, part by 
Blytli, and published in 1848) is alone sufficient to prove. 
As a teacher Wohler ranks with Liebig and Berzelius. In a sense 
he was the greatest of the three. Berzelius, we believe, never had 
the facilities afforded to him for teaching large numbers of students 
in his laboratory ; and as to Liebig, even he lacked the many- 
sidedness which formed so characteristic a feature in the Gottingen 
laboratory as long as it really was under Wohler’s personal direction. 
One student might wish to work on organic chemistry, another on 
minerals, a third on metallurgy, a fourth on rare elements ; let them 
all go to Wohler and they all, like the fifth or sixth, would find 
themselves in the right place. 
That Wohler in these circumstances should have been able to do 
much of literary work would appear incredible if we did not know 
it to be so. His Grundriss der Gliemie , which he published anony- 
mously at first, has passed through many editions and been trans- 
lated into various foreign languages ; never, we are sorry to say, into 
English. A more valuable teaching book still, and more unique in 
its character, is his excellent Practische Uebungen in der cliemischen 
A nalyse (entitled in the second edition Mineral- Analyse in Beisjpielen ), 
which has been translated twice into English, once in this 
country by Hofmann, and a second time (from the second 
German edition) in America. To a man like him the compilation 
of either book probably gave little trouble ; what must have taken 
up a very large portion of his valuable time, are his translations of 
Berzelius’s Lehrbuch der Chemie , and of all the many successive 
volumes of Berzelius’s Jahresbericht , which works only thus became 
really available to the scientific world at large. We must not omit 
to state in this connection that since 1838 Wohler has been one of 
the editors of Liebig’s Annalen. 
Wohler’s last publication dates from 1880. It treats of a new 
kind of galvanic element in which the one metal aluminium serves 
for either pole. We mention this as showing that he continued 
working to almost the edge of his grave. 
