Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/679

 Rh which drive the pumps dry up in summer, was, of course, too blunt an explanation for a clever lecture.

It was then a very wretched time for chemistry in Germany. At most of the universities there was no special chair for chemistry; it was generally handed over to the professor of medicine, who taught it, as much as he knew of it, and that was little enough, along with the branches of toxicology, pharmacology, materia medica, practical medicine, and pharmacy. Many years after this in Giessen, descriptive and comparative anatomy, physiology, zoology, natural history, and botany were in one single hand.

While the labors of the great Swedish chemist, the English and French natural philosophers, Humphry Davy, Wollaston, Biot, Arago, Fresnel, Thenard, and Dulong, opened up entirely new spheres of investigation, all these inestimable acquisitions found no soil in Germany where they could bear fruit. Long years of war had undermined the well-being of the people, and external political pressure had brought in its train the desolation of our universities, filled men with painful anxiety for many years, and turned their desires and their strength in other directions. The national spirit had asserted its freedom and independence in ideal spheres, and by the destruction of belief in authority had brought rich blessings in many ways—for example, in medicine and philosophy; only in physiology it had broken through its natural limits, and wandered far beyond experience.

The goal of science and the fact that it has value only when it is useful to life had almost dropped out of sight, and men amused themselves in an ideal world which had no connection with the real one. It was considered an almost debasing sentiment, and one unworthy of an educated person, to believe that in the body of a living being the crude and vulgar inorganic forces played any part. Life and all its manifestations and conditions were perfectly clear. Natural phenomena were clothed in bewitchingly lovely dress, cut out and fitted by clever men, and this was called philosophical investigation. Experimental instruction in chemistry was all but extinct at the universities, and only the highly educated pharmacists, Klaproth, Hermbstadt, Valentin Rose, Trommsdorff, and Buchholz, had themselves preserved it, but in another department.

I remember, at a much later period, Prof. Wurzer, who held the chair of chemistry at Marburg, showing me a wooden table drawer, which had the property of producing quicksilver every three months. He possessed an apparatus which mainly consisted of a long clay pipe-stem, with which he converted oxygen into nitrogen by making the porous pipe-stem red hot in charcoal, and passing oxygen through it.

Chemical laboratories, in which instruction in chemical