SCHEELE, THE APOTHECARY It is not merely as an investigator and discoverer, but as a high-principled and unassuming man, that Scheele merits our warmest admiration. His aim and object was the discovery of truth. The letters of the man reveal to us in the most pleasant way his high scientific ideal, his genuinely philosophic temper, and his simple mode of thought. 'It is the truth alone that we desire to know, and what joy there is in discovering it!' With these words he himself characterizes his own efforts. MEYER: History of Chemistry. We may regard Scheele not only as having given the first indication of the rich harvest to be reaped by the investigation of the compounds of organic chemistry, but as having been the first to discover and make use of characteristic reactions by which closely allied substances can be detected and separated, so that he must be considered one of the chief founders of analytical chemistry. ROSCOE: Treatise on Chemistry. WHAT a strange creature Poetry chose for her prophet a blind man who begged his bread thru seven towns. But was not Philosophy's founder similarly bad-a bowlegged, bald-headed fellow, with goggle eyes and a sunken nose, who displeased the authorities and drained a cup of hemlock? And I fear that Science has been equally amiss, for the father of Pharmaceutics was a poor invalid, who passed his days in debt, and died young-dreaming of test-tubes. Yet gibe not at these men. The centuries uncover to them. Where are the towns that refused food and welcome to the inspired singer? They are blotted from the map, and if they still linger in the memory it is only because their unworthy streets were once trod by the feet of the poet. Does the courthouse in which it was decided that the philosopher must quench his immortal thirst with hemlock, still dare to stand? No, but the bust of the intellectual martyr adorns the niches of a thousand museums. And that little drug store out in Sweden that couldn't pay its expenses has taken off its sign, but the experiments which the chemist performed in that obscure village will never be removed from the sanctuary of science. Places are swallowed up, cities disappear, nations decay and kingdoms perish, but an unusual man marches thru the aisles of the ages, never to be lost. Amebæ may be identical, but the minds of men differ; Keats had the poetic instinct, and Scheele the scientific spirit. Keats was apprenticed to an apothecary, but he cared more for poems than pills, and sometimes when he mixed an ointment there came to him a sunbeam with fairies floating in the ray. He was a child of Apollo, not Esculapius, and the lustrous parent claimed his favorite son. The pestle was not for the fingers that held poesy's pen, and he exchanged the gallipots of the counter for the galaxy of the heavens, and instead of the dried remains of collected beetles, he searched for the iridescent butterflies that shake their damask wings among the morning-glories. Scheele was sent to a school of languages, but he was more interested in acids than ablatives, and the miracles that take place in a test-tube had for him an awful fascination. And soon in Bauch's drug store was a new clerk, aged fourteen. Little Karl Scheele had begun to rinse bottles, and to wipe the dust from the jars that were seldom used. He removed all dirt from the stem of the funnels, and when he cleaned the metal mortars their polished surfaces reflected back his earnest features. And he told his brothers and sisters all about it, for his parents had ten children besides himself, but what their names were we really do not know. Scheele's original work was done mainly at night. It was then he saw what was never seen before. When the moon glorified the firmament, and a thousand starry orbs looked out, strange power came to him, and he planted his foot on untrodden ground. In his skillful hands the crucible became a sesame that unlocked the door of nature. His spatula was a magic wand that brought forth unknown things. He filled his capsules with the powders of research. His tongs pulled hot coals of fact from the boiling caldron of knowledge. With the bellows of reason he fanned the fires of truth. When his condenser was heated with experiment, it was discoveries that distilled over. Hark, how the midnight was startled by the bubbling of Scheele's alembic! There came a time when physics no longer ministered to the ailing body of the apothecary of Koping. Purges were tried, but without avail; balsams and liniments helped not, and he went to the land where prescriptions are neither prescribed nor dispensed. Yes, he died, leaving a drugstore and a widow; and Scheele wanted both of them. He bought the former, and hoped to acquire the latter when circumstances permitted. (To-day his statue stands at Stockholm, but in those days he couldn't pay his bills.) Business was bad, and it was only several years later that they married. And such a marriage — with Death for the priest! Science seemed jealous that this man should take another mistress, and two days later he died. He had no children— so all chemists could call him father. Perhaps it is better so. Like so many other great men, he might have become the sire of pigmies. Intellectual giant that he was, from his loins might have sprung a race of dwarfs. Aurelius was noble, his son was a monster; Cromwell was mighty, his child was a weakling; Goethe was everything, his offspring was nothing. Heredity is a humbug - often. In estimating Scheele's work we must bear in mind that in his day chemistry had just thrown off the fantastic garb of the alchemists and was hardly accustomed to the scientific clothes which it had lately donned. It is true that among the contemporaries were great-brained workers like Black, Bergmann, Cavendish, Priestley, Rutherford, and Lavoisier; that the subtill science of holy alkimy' was dead among enlightened men; that the Universal Solvent was forgotten and the Philosopher's Stone unsought for; that |