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Marcelin Berthelot: A Study Of A Scientist's Public Role, Reino Virtanen

Papers from the University Studies series (University of Nebraska)

The French chemist Marcelin Berthelot won great recognition during his lifetime, but since his death in 1907 he has become little more than a name for the world at large. He was a representative man-representing his time so completely that there remained little for the future to exploit. A man whose manifold accomplishments were so appropriate to the stage then reached by scientific development that nothing was left over-no loose ends, no undigested ideas, no potentialities unrealized. After Claude Bernard and Louis Pasteur, no scientist in France could challenge his eminence until the turn of the century, when other leading …