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BIOGRAPHIES OF SCIENTIFIC MEN

has been built up in every civilized country of the globe, but especially in England.

Liebig, like his own compatriot Heinrich Heine, could handle the weapon of satire with consummate skill, attacked England in the following words: "England is robbing all other countries of the conditions of their fertility. Already, in her eagerness for bones, she has turned up the battlefields of Leipzig and Waterloo, and of the Crimea; already from the catacombs of Sicily she has carried away the skeletons of many successive generations. Annually she removes from the shores of other countries to her own the manurial equivalent of three millions and a half of men, whom she takes from us the means of supporting, and squanders down her sewers to the sea. Like a vampire she hangs upon the neck of Europe, nay, of the entire world, and sucks the heartblood from nations without a thought of justice towards them, without a shadow of lasting advantage for herself."

His work revolutionized agriculture, and made a science of it. He says in his Familiar Letters on Chemistry that "chemistry leads man into the domain of those latent forces, whose power controls the whole material world, and on whose operation is dependent the production of the most important necessaries of life and society. … No science like chemistry offers to man such a multitude of subjects for thought and reflection, and such stores