14— Pride and Prejudice
1. The literature on nationalism and internationalism in nineteenth-century science is sparse. Useful discussions include Brigitte Schroeder-Gudehus, "Science, Technology and Foreign Policy," in Ina Spiegel-Rösing and Derek Price, eds., Science, Technology and Society: A Cross-Disciplinary Perspective (London: Sage, 1977), pp. 473-506; idem, "Nationalism and Internationalism," in R. C. Olby, G. N. Cantor, J. R. R. Christie, and M. J. S. Hodge, eds., Companion to the History of Modern Science (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 909-919; and Elisabeth Crawford, Nationalism and Internationalism in Science, 1880-1939 (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992), esp. chap. 2. Christoph Meinel has a discussion that focuses on chemistry in particular: "Nationalismus und Internationalismus in der Chemie des 19. Jahrhunderts," in Peter Dilg, ed., Perspektiven der Pharmaziegeschichte (Graz: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, 1983), pp. 225-243.
2. H. E. Armstrong, "The Doctrine of Atomic Valency," Nature , 125 (1930), 807-810 (on pp. 808-809).
3. Edward Frankland began to give Kolbe English in return for German lessons soon after their arrival in London, and Kolbe could "soon speak with facility" (Frankland to Hermann Ost, 20 December 1884, SSDM 3576). However, by 1864 Kolbe reported to Frankland that he had forgotten so much that he needed to be allowed to speak German in presenting a lecture to the Chemical Society (Kolbe to Frankland, 4 December 1864, Frankland Archive 01.04.59). The lecture was never given.
4. Boussingault to Dumas, 1 April 1842, Archives of the Académie des Sciences, Paris; cited and translated in Holmes, Claude Bernard and Animal Chemistry (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1974), p. 42.
5. Kolbe to Vieweg, 21 July and 31 December 1862, 19 October 1863, 31
December 1864, and 18 March, 5 and 16 May 1866, VA 184, 187, 196, 213, 242, 243, and 245. The passage quoted is from Kolbe to Frankland, 27 May 1866, Frankland Archive 01.02.1558.
6. Kolbe to Frankland, 23 July 1866, Frankland Archive 01.02.1505; Kolbe expressed similar sentiments in his letters to Vieweg, 9 and 22 July 1866, VA 246 and 247.
7. Wurtz, "Histoire des doctrines chimiques depuis Lavoisier," in Wurtz, ed., Dictionnaire de chimie pure et appliquée , 3 vols. in 5 (Paris: Hachette, 1868-1878), 1 , i-xciv (on p. i) (republished monographically in 1869).
8. Kolbe, "Über den Zustand der Chemie in Frankreich," JpC , 110 (1870), 173-183.
9. Kolbe to Liebig, 12 November 1870 and 2 December 1870, Liebigiana IIB .
10. Kolbe to Varrentrapp, 26 February 1871, VA 267.
11. Kolbe to Frankland, 26 December 1870, Frankland Archive 01.04.645. Frankland had regretted to see that "there is far too much Gottes Gnaden in [Wilhelm's] nature," and predicted that "in form & constitution the German Despotism will be worse than the French." Still,' he thought that in the results of the war, "the rest of the world will be greatly benefitted . . . unless indeed (which is not likely) the German people, excited by victory, turn to be a warlike, instead of a peaceful people" (Frankland to Kolbe, 23 December 1870, SSDM 3564).
12. Kolbe, "Haltung der Pariser Akademie der Wissenschaften," JpC , 113 (1872), 225-226; idem, "Chemischer Rückblick auf das Jahr 1872," JpC , 114 (1873), 461-470. See also Kolbe's letters to Frankland of 18 March 1872 (Frankland Archive 01.02.948) and to Liebig of 4 April 1872 (see next note).
13. Kolbe to Liebig, 4 April 1872, Liebigiana IIB. For discussions of the contretemps over Pasteur, see Gerald Geison, "Louis Pasteur," DSB , 10 , 350-416 (on p. 354), and John Wotiz and Susanna Rudofsky, "Louis Pasteur, August Kekulé, and the Franco-Prussian War," Journal of Chemical Education , 66 (1988), 34-36.
14. Liebig to Emma Muspratt, 27 September 1870, Roscoe Collection; Liebig to Wöhler, 25 September 1870, in Hofmann, LWB , 2 , 299; Liebig to Kolbe, 2 October 1870, SSDM 3614.
15. Liebig to Wöhler, August 1870, in Hofmann, LWB , 2 , 295.
16. "Hundevolk, diese Franzosen," Kekulé to Hans Hübner, 15 July 1870, August-Kekulé-Sammlung, cited in John Wotiz and Susanna Rudofsky, "The Unknown Kekulé," in James G. Traynham, ed., Essays on the History of Organic Chemistry (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State, Univ. Press, 1987), pp. 21-34 (on p. 31). Wotiz and Rudofsky use the phrase "sons of bitches" to translate the German "Hundevolk." Here they have committed the common error of preferring a more literal to a connotatively more accurate translation. In fact, ''Hundevolk" is undocumented in the German language. "Hunde-" is simply a negatively intensifying prefix and has none of the connotations of profanity that the English expression "son of a bitch" has.
17. Kolbe, "Chemischer Rückblick," pp. 465-466.
18. Kolbe to Varrentrapp, 22 January 1873, VA 304.
19. Kolbe to Volhard, 9 June 1876, SSDM 3681.
20. Kolbe to Vieweg, 6 November 1882, VA 482.è
21. Wurtz, "Éloge de Laurent et de Gerhardt," Moniteur scientifique , 4 (1862), 482-513 (also an offprint separate); "Histoire générale des glycols," in Société Chimique de Paris, Leons de chimie professées en 1860 (Paris: Hachette, 1861), pp. 101-139; ''On Oxide of Ethylene, Considered as a Link between Organic and Mineral Chemistry," JCS , 15 (1862), 387-406; Leçons de chimie professées en 1863 (Paris: Hachette, 1864; identical to Leçons de philosophie chimique , same publisher and date); Cours de philosophie chimique (Paris: privately printed, 1864); Leçons élémentaire de chimie moderne (Paris: Masson, 1867-1868); Dictionnaire de chimie pure et appliquée , 3 vols. in 5 (Paris: Hachette, 1868-1878).
22. See L. Graham, W. Lepenies, and P. Weingart, eds., The Functions and Uses of Disciplinary Histories (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1983). For the discipline of chemistry, see also Jost Weyer, Chemiegeschichtsschreibung von Wiegleb (1790) bis Partington (1970) (Hildesheim: Gerstenberg, 1974); and C. A. Russell, "'Rude and Disgraceful Beginnings': A View of History of Chemistry from the Nineteenth Century," British Journal for the History of Science , 21 (1988), 273-294 (on pp. 288-294), who has some additional apposite examples.
23. Kopp, Entwickelung der Chemie in der neueren Zeit (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1873). The work was published in three parts, beginning in 1871. A discussion of this work in a Kolbean context is my "'Between Two Stools': Kopp, Kolbe, and the History of Chemistry," Bulletin for the History of Chemistry , 7 (1990), 19-24.
24. For example, Jacob Volhard, Justus von Liebig , 2 vols. (Leipzig: Barth, 1909), 2 , 418-422.
25. Liebig to Wöhler, 30 September 1870, in Hofmann, LWB , 2 , 300.
26. Liebig to Wöhler, 7 December 1870, in Hofmann, LWB , 2 , 304.
27. Liebig to Wöhler, 24 May 1845, in Hofmann, LWB , 1 , 257.
28. Liebig, "Eröffnungsworte . . . nach dem Friedensschluss," 28 March 1871, in Reden und Abhandlungen (Leipzig and Heidelberg: Winter, 1874), pp. 331-333; excerpted by Volhard, Liebig , 2 , 420-422.
29. W. H. Brock, "Liebig, Wöhler, Hofmann—An English Perspective," in W. Lewicki, ed., Wöhler und Liebig: Briefe von 1829-1873 (Göttingen: Cromm, 1982), pp. xvi-xviii; this is a photographic one-volume republication, with new front matter, of Hofmann's edition of the Liebig-Wöhler correspondence.
30. S. Kapoor, "Jean-Baptiste Dumas," DSB , 4 , 242-248 (on p. 243).
31. Richard Willstötter, From My Life (New York: Benjamin, 1965).
32. Albert Ladenburg, Lebenserinnerungen (Breslau: Trewendt & Granier, 1912), pp. 51-52. Neither Willstätter nor Ladenburg were practicing Jews, and both were fully assimilated Germans. Ladenburg was in fact an atheist; for reasons that he does not explain, he finally underwent baptism in 1891.
33. A sampling of the large literature that pertains to these issues is as follows: Jacob Katz, From Prejudice to Destruction: Anti-Semitism, 1700-1933 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1980), pp. 145-220; George Mosse,
Germans and Jews (New York: Fertig, 1970); Peter Gay, Freud, Jews, and Other Germans (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1978), pp. 93-168; W. E. Mosse, Jews in the German Economy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987); W. E. Mosse, ed., Juden im Wilhelminischen Deutschland 1890-1914 (Tübingen: Mohr, 1976); R. Rürup, "Emancipation and Crisis: The 'Jewish Question' in Germany, 1850-1890," Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook , 20 (London: Secker and Warburg, 1975), 13-25; Fritz Stern, Gold and Iron: Bismarck, Bleichröder, and the Building of the German Empire (New York: Knopf, 1977); and David L. Preston, "Science, Society, and the German Jews: 1870-1933," Ph.D. dissertation, Univ. of Illinois, 1971.
34. This paragraph summarizes material in Preston's valuable dissertation; see esp. pp. 21-24, 99-118, and 216-222.
35. It is often difficult to identify Jews, as most obituarists of scientists do not mention religion. The Neue deutsche Biographie does, but it is as yet only half complete. The best source for late nineteenth-century German chemists' biographies and obituaries, particularly for less well known figures, is the Berichte . Also helpful are such compilations as Salomon Wininger, ed., Grosse jüdische Nationalbiographie , 5 vols. (Leipzig: Braun, n.d. [ca. 1925]), and Charlotte Politzer, "Chemie," in Sigmund Kaznelson, ed., Juden im deutschen Kulturbereich (Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1959), pp. 429-450, which was completed shortly after 1933, but because of the rise of Nazism, was not published until much later. Unfortunately, such philosemitic compilations do not distinguish between practicing, nonpracticing, and baptized Jews—or even, perhaps, children of baptized Jewish parents.
36. A. W. Hofmann, "Gustav Magnus," in Zur Erinnerung an vorangegangene Freunde , 3 vols. (Braunschweig: Vieweg, 1888), 1 , 43-194. All three chemists can be found in the German philosemitic literature.
37. David E. Rowe, "'Jewish Mathematics' at Göttingen in the Era of Felix Klein," Isis , 77 (1986), 422-449 (on p. 429).
38. Hans Rosenberg, Grosse Depression und Bismarckzeit (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1967), pp. 88-117.
39. Alexander Busch, Die Geschichte des Privatdozenten (Stuttgart: Enke, 1959), pp. 148-162; Fritz K. Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890-1933 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 135-139.
40. Preston, "German Jews," pp. 110-112. No statistics were ever compiled on the distinctions between professing and baptized Jews in nineteenth-century German academia.
41. Ringer, pp. 5-13; a more recent study is Konrad H. Jarausch, Students, Society, and Politics in Imperial Germany: The Rise of Academic Illiberalism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1982).
42. As related by Frankland to Roscoe, 9 January 1879, Roscoe Collection. Kolbe was aware of the pun, but got it somewhat wrong, as he proudly related to Wöhler (31 March [1880], Wöhler Nachlass) that someone had applied the name "Journal für chemische Polizei."
43. Volhard, "Die Begründung der Chemie durch Lavoisier," JpC , 110 (1870), 1-47; Kolbe, "Über den Zustand der Chemie in Frankreich," JpC , 110
(1870), pp. 173-183; N. Zinin, A. Butlerov, D. Mendeleev, and A. Engelhardt, St. Petersburger Zeitung , Nr. 271 (4 October 1870), cited in Volhard, "Berichtigung," JpC , 110 (1870), 381-384 (on p. 381).
44. Volhard, "Berichtigung"; Liebig to Kolbe, 9 November 1870, SSDM 3615; Berichte , 3 (24 October 1870), 873.
45. Kolbe to Baeyer, 29 May 1871, Baeyer Collection.
46. Baeyer to Kolbe, 8 June 1871, SSDM 3628.
47. Kolbe to Baeyer, 5 June 1871, Baeyer Collection; Baeyer to Kolbe, 8 June 1871, SSDM 3628.
48. Kolbe wrote Liebig on 4 January 1870, giving him the news that he had accepted the editorship of the JpC (Liebigiana IIB); it is quite clear from the correspondence that he had not asked for prior approval. In his letter to Baeyer of 5 June 1871, Kolbe also responded to Baeyer's implication of hypocrisy by asserting that Liebig had sent him his article on "Fermentation" with the request that Kolbe publish it as one of the first of his tenure as editor. However, the letter of 4 January 1870 has Kolbe asking Liebig for permission to re publish the article in his journal, an offprint of which Liebig had simply sent him as a courtesy. Finally, in this letter Kolbe told Liebig that he intended to remain faithful to the Annalen by continuing to publish most of his works there. On the contrary, Kolbe never published another paper in the Annalen . Baeyer responded to Kolbe's arguments (Baeyer to Kolbe, 25 June 1871, SSDM 3629) by suggesting that Liebig must certainly have been distressed by Kolbe's action in taking over a competitor journal, but that he had been too polite to say so directly. Baeyer probably did not know the details mentioned here, but he was likely correct in his presumption. Kopp, the managing editor of the Annalen , was certainly distressed. On 7 and 20 January 1870, Kopp wrote Liebig, worrying about the dangerous competition represented by Kolbe's new journal (cited in Max Speter, "'Vater Kopp,'" Osiris , 5 [1938], 392-460, on p. 447).
49. Kolbe to Baeyer, 5 June 1871 (quoted) and 9 June 1871, Baeyer Collection.
50. Hofmann to Kolbe, 12 June 1871, SSDM 3557.
51. Kolbe to Hofmann, 29 May, 5 June, 26 June, and 8 December 1871, Chemiker-Briefe.
52. Kolbe to Baeyer, 27 June 1871; Baeyer to Kolbe, July 1871; Kolbe to Baeyer, 1 August 1871; all printed in Berichte , 4 (1871), 993-995. Kolbe to Liebig, 26 January 1872, Liebigiana IIB.
53. Kolbe to Volhard, 26 June 1871, SSDM 3656.
54. Kolbe, "Chemischer Rückblick auf das Jahr 1871," JpC , 112 (1871), 464-468; ". . . 1872," JpC , 114 (1872), 461-470; ". . . 1873," JpC , 116 (1873), 417-425; ". . . 1874," JpC , 118 (1874), 449-456.
55. ibid. Berichte , 4 (1871), 993-995; ibid., 5 (1872), 1114-1116.
54. Kolbe, "Chemischer Rückblick auf das Jahr 1871," JpC , 112 (1871), 464-468; ". . . 1872," JpC , 114 (1872), 461-470; ". . . 1873," JpC , 116 (1873), 417-425; ". . . 1874," JpC , 118 (1874), 449-456.
55. ibid. Berichte , 4 (1871), 993-995; ibid., 5 (1872), 1114-1116.
56. Kolbe to Varrentrapp, 4 October 1871, 22 January 1873, 24 February 1873, 16 June 1873, and 18 June 1873 (VA 269, 304, 305, 309, and 310); Kolbe to Liebig, 1 January 1872, 26 January 1872, and 23 February 1873 (Liebigiana IIB); Kolbe to Volhard, 23 December 1873, 8 January 1874 and 10 April 1874 (SSDM 3666, 3667, 3668); Kolbe to Kopp, 12 March 1882 (SSDM 3633).
57. Kolbe to Liebig, 26 January 1872 (in n. 56); Liebig to Kolbe, 3 January 1872 and 20 July 1872 (SSDM 3618 and 3617); Bunsen to Kolbe, 10 July 1872 and 3 November 1873 (SSDM 3504 and 3505); L. Meyer to Kolbe, 14 April 1873 (SSDM 3532); Kolbe to Varrentrapp, 16 June 1873 (VA 309); Kolbe to Volhard, 23 December 1873 (SSDM 3666); Kekulé to Erlenmeyer, 26 December 1874, Dingler Nachlass.
58. Beilstein to Erlenmeyer, 5 October 1873, in Otto Krätz, ed., Beilstein-Erlenmeyer: Briefe zur Geschichte der chemischen Dokumentation und des chemischen Zeitschriftenwesens (Munich: Fritsch, 1972), pp. 41-45.
59. Meyer to Baeyer, 11 February 1872, Baeyer Collection.
60. Kolbe to Varrentrapp, 4 October 1871, 22 January 1873, and 18 June 1873 (VA 269, 304 and 310); Kolbe to Kopp, 12 March 1882 (SSDM 3633).
61. Kolbe to Varrentrapp, 18 June 1873 and 22 January 1873, VA 310 and 304.
62. This according to letters from Kolbe to Varrentrapp, 8 June and 18 June 1873 (VA 308 and 310); the letter from Kolbe to Hofmann does not seem to have survived.
63. During his stay in Berlin, Kolbe called on Hofmann twice. The first time he was informed that Hofmann was not in, the second time that Hofmann had left town (ibid., VA 308). There exist three letters from Hofmann to Kolbe and one from Kolbe to Hofmann written after 1873, but none are substantive (SSDM 3558, 3560, and 3561, and Kolbe to Hofmann, 2 March 1877, Chemiker-Briefe).
64. These events are described more fully, for example, in Katz, Anti-Semitism , pp. 245-252.
65. See Jarausch, Students , pp. 208-212 and 264-271; Hermann yon Petersdorff, Die Vereine Deutscher Studenten: Zwölf Jahre akademischer Käimpfe , 2d ed. (Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1895), pp. 7-22.
66. Jarausch, Students , pp. 208-212 and 264-271; Petersdorff, Vereine , pp. 23-63.
67. Petersdorff, Vereine , p. 41.
68. Volhard, Hofmann , p. 137. On Hofmann's fight against the antisemites, see also Monika Müller, "Aus dem Leben und Wirken des Chemikers und Hochschullehrers August Wilhelm von Hofmann (1818-1892)," Ph.D. dissertation, Humboldt-Universität Berlin, 1981, pp. 46-52.
69. Volhard, Hofmann , pp. 192-195.
70. Postscript by Lothar Meyer to letter of Beilstein to Erlenmeyer, 28 August 1880, in Krätz, Beilstein-Erlenmeyer , p. 75. The reader is reminded that Kolbe's laboratory and dwelling were on the Waisenhausstrasse in Leipzig.
71. Kolbe to Volhard, 26 June 1871 and 2 July 1874, SSDM 3656 and 3669. To be precise, Volhard was not a student of Kolbe's but rather worked in Kolbe's Marburg lab for a year after he received his doctorate and before he became Liebig's assistant.
72. D. Vorländer, "Jacob Volhard," Berichte , 45 (1912), 1855-1902 (on pp. 1856-1858). Volhard's internationalism is indicated by his agitation in 1873, along with Kekulé and Erlenmeyer, to reserve honorary memberships in the DCG for foreigners only: Richard Anschütz, August Kekulé , 2 vols. (Berlin:
Verlag Chemie, 1929), 1 , 419. Volhard also made much of Liebig's internationalism in his biography ( Justus Liebig , 2 , 418-422). Jacob's father, Karl Ferdinand Volhard, had been a schoolmate of Liebig and was also an intimate friend of the liberal politician Heinrich von Gagern, prime minister of Hesse-Darmstadt and president of the Frankfurt Parliament (this according to Liebig's letter to Wöhler of 29 August 1848, in Hofmann, LWB , 1 , 320). There may even have been Jewish blood in Volhard's family, for Liebig mentions in a letter to Hofmann (5 December 1850, in Brock, LHB , p. 103) that K. F. Volhard was removed from state service without pension "wegen seiner Abstammung." He then became a private attorney.
73. Kolbe to Volhard, 20 November 1878, SSDM 3684.
74. Kolbe, "Begründung meiner Urtheile über Ad. Baeyer's wissenschaftliche Qualification," JpC , 134 (1882), 308-323.
75. Volhard to Frau Baeyer, 2 December 1882, Baeyer Collection.
76. Volhard, Hofmann ; H. Caro's history of the German dye industry, in which Hofmann features prominently, appeared in Berichte , 25 (1892), 955-1105; F. A. Abel, H. E. Armstrong, W. H. Perkin, and L. Playfair, "Hofmann Memorial Lectures," JCS , 69 (1896), 575-732; and B. Lepsius, Festschrift zur Feier des 50jährigen Bestehens der Deutschen Chemischen Gesellschaft und des 100. Geburtstages ihres Begründers August Wilhelm von Hofmann (Berlin: Friedländer, 1918).
77. Volhard, Hofmann , p. 137.
78. Volhard's talk is mentioned in Vorländer, "Volhard," p. 1865; Hofmann's obituary of Kolbe is in Berichte , 17 (1884), 2809-2812.
79. Hofmann, Erinnerung . There are a total of fifteen biographies here; several, including those for Liebig, Wurtz, Dumas, and Magnus, are book-length. Hofmann also wrote a total of fifty-one obituaries in the Berichte .
80. Wurtz, Geschichte der chemischen Theorien seit Lavoisier bis auf unsere Zeit , trans. A. Oppenheim (Berlin: R. Oppenheim, 1870). In editorial notes (pp. iii-viii), Oppenheim defended his former teacher and censured his fellow Germans for their excessive chauvinism.
81. Gay, Freud, Jews, and Other Germans , pp. 14-16.
82. Elisabeth Vaupel has shown that even so liberal a man as Carl Graebe, whose relationships with Liebermann and other Jews were very close, occasionally betrayed negative prejudices: "Carl Graebe (1841-1927)—Leben, Werk und Wirken im Spiegel seines brieflichen Nachlasses," Ph.D. dissertation, Univ. of Munich, 1987, pp. 281-284.
83. Here are some exceptions to this statement. Vaupel ("Carl Graebe," p. 281) mentions a letter from Otto Witt to Graebe (13 July 1904, SSDM 1976-29 0), wherein Witt inquired about a certain candidate's suspicious racial background, stating that he avoided hiring Jews as assistants. Vaupel has also published a passage from a letter by Liebig (to C. Crämer, 13 May 1860, Liebig-Museum, Giessen) that has distinct antisemitic references: "Justus von Liebig und die Glasversilberung," Praxis der Naturwissenschaften—Chemie , 40 (1991), 22-29 (on p. 29). David Cahan cites Friedrich Kohlrausch (1840-1910) directing an inquiry about the Jewishness of a candidate to a friend in 1885: "Kohlrausch and Electrolytic Conductivity," Osiris , [2] 5
84. This was particularly emphasized by Hofmann, in Erinnerung , 1 ,342-344. Not far beneath the surface is the rhetorical point that if Oppenheim could inspire such love in the ultranationalist antisemite Treitschke, he deserves no treasonous opprobrium for having translated Wurtz' Histoire .
85. Victor Meyer described to his brother an extremely flattering and generous letter he had received from Kolbe in autumn 1874 ("astonishing, from such a raging tyrant," he commented): Richard Meyer, Victor Meyer: Leben und Wirken eines deutschen Chemikers und Naturforschers (Leipzig: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft, 1917), p. 88. To be sure, Kolbe may not have known Meyer was Jewish. Kolbe also recommended Ladenburg to Vieweg Verlag for editing duties: Ladenburg is "zwar Jude, aber wegen Tüchtigkeit und Gewandtheit in der Darstellung zu empfehlen" (Kolbe to Lücke, 8 June 1876, VA 342); he also praised Ladenburg's history of chemistry in JpC , 110 (1870), 175.
86. Hofmann, The Question of a Division of the Philosophical Faculty , 2d ed. (Boston: Ginn, 1883), pp. 74-75.
87. William Coleman, "Prussian Pedagogy: Purkyne at Breslau, 1823-1839," in Coleman and F. L. Holmes, eds., The Investigative Enterprise: Experimental Physiology in Nineteenth-Century Medicine (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1988), pp. 15-64 (on pp. 28-37 and 47-48).
88. Rowe, "'Jewish Mathematics.'" Kathryn Olesko, "On Institutes, Investigations, and Scientific Training," in Coleman and Holmes, eds., Investigative Enterprise , pp. 295-332 (on p. 298), also argues this point.
89. Christoph Meinel, Karl Friedrich Zöllner und die Wissenschaftskultur der Gründerzeit (Berlin: Sigma, 1991), p. 5 and passim. Zöllner's famous diatribe is his Ueber die Natur der Cometen , 3d ed. (Leipzig: Staackmann, 1883; first published 1872). The classic treatment of antimodernist culture, though not directed toward science, is Fritz Stern's Politics of Cultural Despair (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1961).
90. Kolbe to Hofmann, 30 June 1872, Chemiker-Briefe; Kolbe to Heinrich Vieweg, 22 January 1873, VA 304; Kolbe, "Erklärung," JpC , 113 (1872), 480-481.
91. Beyerchen, Scientists Under Hitler (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1977).
92. Volhard, Hofmann , pp. 192-195.
93. Quoted in Koppel S. Pinson, Modern Germany: Its History and Civilization , 2d ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1966), p. 278.
94. Kolbe to Vieweg, 7 November and 30 December 1865, VA 236 and 239; Wöhler to Kolbe, 5 November 1867, SSDM 3539; Kolbe to Liebig, 10 December 1872, Liebigiana IIB; Kolbe to Varrentrapp, 1 and 16 December 1872, VA 301 and 302.
95. Kolbe to Volhard, 16 and 19 May, 19 June, and 3 August 1873, 8 January, 2 July, and 20 November 1874, and 25 April 1875, SSDM 3658, 3659, 3661, 3663, 3667, 3669, 3673, and 3677; Kolbe to Varrentrapp, 16 and 18 June 1873, VA 309 and 310. Although I have not located Volhard's side of this correspondence, it appears that he was under the impression that Kolbe would have been called had his conditions been more reasonable. Further details on the Munich succession are not known to me. Prandtl's statement ("Laboratorium," pp. 88-89) that Baeyer was third on the faculty's list would suggest that Kolbe was the first choice of the faculty, but that his call was derailed at the ministerial level.
96. According to his letter to Erlenmeyer of 3 February 1875, Kekulé was given a salary increase from 2200 to 3000 thalers per year (printed in Anschütz, Kekulé , 1 , 465).
97. Lieben to Erlenmeyer, 11 October 1873, SSDM 1968-190/7. As we have noted, Kolbe actually became Geheimrat a few months before Liebig's death. The reference to the Bible plays on the quotation from the Wisdom of Solomon that Kolbe had placed above the wall-sized chart of the chemical elements in his auditorium.
98. Kolbe to Volhard, 16 May 1873, SSDM 3663.
99. Kolbe to Bertha Ost, 22 January 1872, SSDM 6797. It is interesting that he stated his total teaching income here as 4000 thalers, which would mean only 2000 from student honoraria and fees. To be sure, he had substantially more students three semesters later at the time of his letter to Volhard, but one wonders whether he may have overstated his income to Volhard, or understated it to Bertha, or both.
100. Kolbe to H. Vieweg, 9 July 1877, VA 379.
101. Kolbe, Das neue chemische Laboratorium der Universität Leipzig (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1868); idem, Das chemische Laboratorium der Universität Leipzig (Braunschweig: Vieweg, 1872). Many German chemists published such works during the nineteenth century. Perhaps the earliest model, as in so many other respects, was Liebig's Das chemische Laboratorium der Ludwigs-Universität Giessen (Heidelberg: Winter, 1842). Probably Kolbe's immediate model, however, was that of the son of Liebig's architect, namely Hofmann, who published two editions of papers from his London lab (1849-1853) and followed them in 1866 with a detailed description of the Berlin and Bonn labs in construction, both of which were being built for his occupancy.
102. Kolbe, E. von Meyer, ed., Ausführliches Lehr- und Handbuch der organischen Chemie , 2d ed., 2 vols. (Braunschweig: Vieweg, 1880-1884), esp. 2 , 387-391 and 639.
103. Kolbe, Kurzes Lehrbuch der anorganischen [organischen] Chemie , 2 vols. (Braunschweig: Vieweg, 1877-1883).
104. Kolbe to Liebig, 2 February, 17 March, and 15 December 1869, Liebigiana IIB; Kolbe to Varrentrapp, 28 February 1870, VA 266. Kolbe reported that the Uruguayan factory was producing 10,000 kilograms of beef extract per month.
105. Kolbe to Varrentrapp, 2 February 1872 and 24 July 1873, VA 274 and 305; Kolbe to Bertha Ost, 22 January 1872, SSDM 6797; and Kolbe to Zarncke, 3 November [1870] and 18 June 1872, Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig,
Handschriftenabteilung. Several parties or balls hosted by the Kolbes are described in these letters, many in the range of 40 to 60 guests; such activity is consistent with spending 200 thalers a year on entertaining, as he told his sister. Armstrong also described a "bachelors dinner party" at the Kolbes' where "great dissipation" was indulged in, while the "old man" became "immensely lively and entertaining": Henry Armstrong to Richard Armstrong, 14 July 1869, cited in J. Vargas Eyre, Henry Edward Armstrong, 1848-1937 (London: Butterworths, 1958), p. 49.
106. Carl Kolbe (1855-1909) finished his education with Rudolf Fittig in Strasbourg, earning his Ph.D. in 1882. After two years working at Kalle & Co. in Biebrich, he succeeded the retiring Heyden at the Radebeul salicylic acid works—at a salary of 9000 thalers! (Kolbe to Bertha Ost, 24 November 1884, SSDM 6813; this was Kolbe's last letter, for he died the following day.) He married Emilie Pistor in 1883 or 1884. An obituary is in Zeitschrift für angewandte Chemie , 22 (1909), 2272, and further (unhappy) details are in Meyer's Lebenserinnerungen (n.p., n.d., ca. 1918), pp. 133-134.
107. These data are taken from Meyer, Lebenserinnerungen , and Poggendorff. Maria's eldest son, Ferdinand Hermann Krauss (1889-1938), became ausserordentlicher Professor of chemistry at the Braunschweig Technische Hochschule.
108. In 1882 Kolbe weighed 196 Pfund (i.e., 98 kilograms or 216 pounds): Kolbe to H. Vieweg, 20 March 1882, VA 477. He knew he suffered from "Herzverfettung": Kolbe to Lücke, 11 July 1879, VA 445. He ate red meat at nearly every meal and few vegetables, with the consent and approval of his personal physician, Thiersch: Kolbe to Varrentrapp, 29 July 1874, VA 321; Kolbe to H. Vieweg, 13 June 1880, VA 456. Thiersch was Liebig's son-in-law, and it is relevant to note that Liebig's nutritional ideas placed great emphasis on protein.
109. Kolbe to H. Vieweg, 11 April 1877, VA 369. The course of Charlotte Kolbe's final illness is described in the Kolbe-Vieweg correspondence, as well as in Kolbe to Hofmann, 2 March 1877, Chemiker-Briefe.
110. Meyer to Ostwald, 25 November 1884, Ostwald Nachlass, Zentrales Archiv der Akademie der Wissenschaften der DDR. An autopsy revealed advanced arteriosclerosis: "Hermann Kolbe," Chemiker-Zeitung , 8 (30 November 1884), 1725-1726.