By 1840 Justus Liebig was one of Europe’s leading chemists. His laboratory at Giessen was the wonder of the scientific world: a pioneering teaching laboratory, where students from across Europe learned chemistry by doing it. It became a model for laboratory education. This slim pamphlet, in its original ornamental printed wrappers, is Liebig at his most incendiary. Two years earlier he had published a journal article on the state of chemistry in Prussia so blistering that, as he reports in the opening lines here, a swarm of critics spent the interval trying to refute him. This is his answer to those critics: the article reprinted and doubled down upon, prefaced by his great essay on the study of the natural sciences. Prussia, the land of universities, had let chemistry rot into lecture-hall recitation, taught by men who had never made an experiment, while France and England raced ahead. The remedy was the laboratory.
The villain of the piece is Naturphilosophie, the Romantic school of Schelling and his followers that spun the universe out of polarities and world-souls. Liebig reserved his finest fury for it. In this essay he branded it with a sentence that became proverbial: the activity of the nature-philosophers, he wrote, "was the pestilence, the Black Death of the century." He had been burned himself. As a student he had passed through Schelling’s lecture room and counted it time stolen from his life. Here is the exorcism of Romantic science, written by the man who did more than any other to replace the philosopher’s intuition with the chemist’s balance.
The pamphlet survives here as issued: untrimmed in the publisher’s buff wrappers printed with a lace-like ornamental border, never bound. The title page carries Liebig’s full parade of honors: professor at Giessen, knight of the Hessian Ludwig Order, member of the academies of London, Stockholm, Dublin, Berlin, Munich, St. Petersburg. Berlin is in the list, which only sharpens the joke. Braunschweig, Vieweg, 1840: the first separate edition of a landmark in the history of how science is taught.
LIEBIG, Justus (von) (1803-1873). Ueber das Studium der Naturwissenschaften und über den Zustand der Chemie in Preußen. Braunschweig: Verlag, Druck und Papier von Friedrich Vieweg und Sohn, 1840. First separate edition.
Physical Description: Octavo, 47 pp., untrimmed. Half-title present; title with Liebig’s full styling and memberships; the second essay (Der Zustand der Chemie in Preußen) opening with Liebig’s reference to his original article in the Annalen der Pharmacie (XXV [1838], 339) and the controversy it raised.
Binding: Publisher’s buff printed wrappers with ornamental border, as issued; never bound.
Condition: Fragile as such pamphlets are: the wrappers detached and chipped at the edges with the spine strip largely perished, text block loosening; internally foxed and toned throughout, heavier at the outer leaves; complete and entirely unsophisticated, preserved in its original state.
By 1840 Justus Liebig was one of Europe’s leading chemists. His laboratory at Giessen was the wonder of the scientific world: a pioneering teaching laboratory, where students from across Europe learned chemistry by doing it. It became a model for laboratory education. This slim pamphlet, in its original ornamental printed wrappers, is Liebig at his most incendiary. Two years earlier he had published a journal article on the state of chemistry in Prussia so blistering that, as he reports in the opening lines here, a swarm of critics spent the interval trying to refute him. This is his answer to those critics: the article reprinted and doubled down upon, prefaced by his great essay on the study of the natural sciences. Prussia, the land of universities, had let chemistry rot into lecture-hall recitation, taught by men who had never made an experiment, while France and England raced ahead. The remedy was the laboratory.
The villain of the piece is Naturphilosophie, the Romantic school of Schelling and his followers that spun the universe out of polarities and world-souls. Liebig reserved his finest fury for it. In this essay he branded it with a sentence that became proverbial: the activity of the nature-philosophers, he wrote, "was the pestilence, the Black Death of the century." He had been burned himself. As a student he had passed through Schelling’s lecture room and counted it time stolen from his life. Here is the exorcism of Romantic science, written by the man who did more than any other to replace the philosopher’s intuition with the chemist’s balance.
The pamphlet survives here as issued: untrimmed in the publisher’s buff wrappers printed with a lace-like ornamental border, never bound. The title page carries Liebig’s full parade of honors: professor at Giessen, knight of the Hessian Ludwig Order, member of the academies of London, Stockholm, Dublin, Berlin, Munich, St. Petersburg. Berlin is in the list, which only sharpens the joke. Braunschweig, Vieweg, 1840: the first separate edition of a landmark in the history of how science is taught.
LIEBIG, Justus (von) (1803-1873). Ueber das Studium der Naturwissenschaften und über den Zustand der Chemie in Preußen. Braunschweig: Verlag, Druck und Papier von Friedrich Vieweg und Sohn, 1840. First separate edition.
Physical Description: Octavo, 47 pp., untrimmed. Half-title present; title with Liebig’s full styling and memberships; the second essay (Der Zustand der Chemie in Preußen) opening with Liebig’s reference to his original article in the Annalen der Pharmacie (XXV [1838], 339) and the controversy it raised.
Binding: Publisher’s buff printed wrappers with ornamental border, as issued; never bound.
Condition: Fragile as such pamphlets are: the wrappers detached and chipped at the edges with the spine strip largely perished, text block loosening; internally foxed and toned throughout, heavier at the outer leaves; complete and entirely unsophisticated, preserved in its original state.
