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BIOGRAPHIES OF SCIENTIFIC MEN

them): it may easily be imagined how fatal such a practice was to the graces of elocution. Goethe alludes to it in Faust:—

Doch euch des Schreibens ja befleisst
Als dictirt "euch der Heilig" Geist.

It may be mentioned that many parts of Faust are unintelligible to the reader who knows nothing of German university life.

During this period he studied natural science, and his progress was marked with such success that he was granted a pension or scholarship by the Grand Duke of Hesse-Darmstadt, which enabled him to continue his studies and researches. Liebig went to Paris in 1823. Having communicated a paper on fulminic acid to the Académie des Sciences, he was introduced to Alexander von Humboldt, Gay-Lussac, and other savants then living in the French capital. Liebig became a pupil in the laboratory of the famous chemist Gay-Lussac, discoverer of the law of volume. At the beginning of the nineteenth century there were only a few chemists in Germany, and this was the reason that he went to Paris.

In the same year that Liebig went to France, he began to perfect the method of organic or combustion analysis. The principle of the method is the one now used for determining the carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen in organic compounds. The compound is heated with copper oxide in a glass tube, and the carbon and hydrogen are