ABSTRACT
Ernst von Meyer, 1847–1916, was a German professor of chemistry. This chapter reflects on the long history of chemistry and the shifting fortunes of the status of experimentation since ancient times, with corresponding effects on the status of knowledge. The philosophical writings of the Ancients, especially those of the Greeks and Romans, give us a tolerably distinct idea of their theoretical views. The iatro-chemical theories strove after the impossible, and therefore quickly succumbed; the marked one-sidedness apparent in them, the gratuitous explanations of life-processes, and the total neglect of the anatomy and morphology of the organs, made their decline inevitable. The learned societies which came into existence in the second half of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries, and whose periodicals spread abroad the results of chemical investigations, aided materially towards the healthy development of the science.
