Boussingault: Chemist and Agriculturist (Chemists and Chemistry, 2)

It was the British music critic Neville Cardus, writing on Debussy, who remarked how "the great sea of Wagner threatened to overwhelm the world of nineteenth century music". 1 There is an analogy in mid-nineteenth­ century agriculture where the great sea of Justus von Liebig developed a tidal wave which to this day conceals much of the original work and merit of others in the same field. Not only the general public but even students of agriculture may, or may not, recall the names of Persoz, Kuhlmann and Ville in France, Thaer and Sprengel in Germany, or even Lawes and Gilbert in England, to mention a few of them, whose pioneer works were not pub­ licised in the same didactic and polemical manner as those of Liebig. Among such pioneers was Jean Baptiste Boussingault (1802-1887) whose funda­ mental researches contributed to the emergence of agriculture from an empirical corpus of facts to the status of a science. Yet apart from his work in animal and crop science he also engaged in metallurgical investigations, biology and pure chemistry. The scientific world was already approaching the end of an era in which it was possible to embrace several disciplines adequately. With increasing specialisation, institutionalism and profeSsionalism in science the polymath was a gradually disappearing species Front Matter....Pages i-xviii The Beginnings....Pages 1-16 Alsace and the New World....Pages 17-26 South America....Pages 27-44 The Great Volcanoes of the Andes....Pages 45-57 Paris, Lyon and Paris Again....Pages 58-71 The Experimental Farm and Crop Rotation....Pages 72-88 The Experimental Farm and Animal Nutrition....Pages 89-97 Conservatoire Des Arts Et Metiers....Pages 98-109 The Conservatoire and Politics....Pages 110-122 The Plant and Nitrogen....Pages 123-138 The Nitrification of the Soil....Pages 139-147 Education and Hygiene....Pages 148-159 Photosynthesis, or the Plant and Carbon Dioxide....Pages 160-170 The Metallurgical Period....Pages 171-187 The Last Years....Pages 188-203 Assessment....Pages 204-214 Back Matter....Pages 215-280