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Chemists recall with just pride that the Remarques sur les forces de la nature animée, contemptuously rejected by all the journals of physics, were received and published in the Annalen of Liebig.
There are numerous well-known calculations of the proportions of the various constituents of the atmosphere, which we owe to Priestley, Dalton, Black, Cavendish, Liebig, and others; but that given by Professor Ansted is sufficiently simple and intelligible. In 10 volumes or parts of it, he gives to and he adds a trace of Ammoniacal Vapor.
Forty years ago I asked Liebig ... if he believed that the grass and flowers, which we saw around us, grew by mere mechanical force. He answered, 'No more than I could believe that a book of botany describing them could grow by mere chemical force."
But never had I met with a student in whom a knowledge so extensive was mixed up with notions so obsolete or so crotchety. In one sentence he showed that he had mastered some late discovery by Faraday or Liebig; in the next sentence he was talking the wild fallacies of Cardan or Van Helmont.
At home I always made his soup myself, for, being always the same by his own choice he was particular about the flavor; it was merely onion-soup with either cream and parsley, or onion-soup with Liebig and chervil. In the great summer heat he took instead of it cold milk and brown bread.
I remember there was one and, on the whole, not a bad one. It was suggested by Baron Liebig, the celebrated chemist, who said: "If you wish a single material by which to judge of the amount of culture that any nation, or, for that matter, any individual, possesses, compared to another one, find out how much soap they use.
This last treatise contained the results of certain experiments, then new in chemistry, which were adduced in support of a theory I entertained as to the re-invigoration of the human system by principles similar to those which Liebig has applied to the replenishment of an exhausted soil, namely, the giving back to the frame those essentials to its nutrition, which it has lost by the action or accident of time; or supplying that special pabulum or energy in which the individual organism is constitutionally deficient; and neutralizing or counterbalancing that in which it super-abounds, a theory upon which some eminent physicians have more recently improved with signal success.
Granting all this, we must not expect too much from "science" as distinguished from common experience. There are ten thousand experimenters without special apparatus for every one in the laboratory. Accident is the great chemist and toxicologist. Battle is the great vivisector. Hunger has instituted researches on food such as no Liebig, no Academic Commission has ever recorded.
What do you understand by humus? as, according to Liebig, humus sometimes means one thing and sometimes another, and he appears to treat it very much as modern chemists treat phlogiston, as something which they don't comprehend, but which they need to explain the phenomena of vegetation. If you are a believer in humus, what is it composed of, and how does it act in forwarding vegetation?
These facts have long been known, as insulated truths of the lowest order of generalization; but it was reserved for Liebig, by an apt employment of the first two of our methods of experimental inquiry, to connect these truths together by a higher induction, pointing out what property, common to all these deleterious substances, is the really operating cause of their fatal effect.
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