It is a model of all that is desirable in a
scientific memoir. The paper on uric acid is remarkable for the number
of interesting transformation products described in it, and the skill
displayed in devising methods for the isolation and purification of the
new compounds. Comparatively little has been added to our knowledge of
uric acid since the appearance of the paper of Liebig and Woehler.
It would lead too far to attempt to give a complete list of the papers
which have appeared under the name of Woehler alone. In 1828 he made the
remarkable discovery that when an aqueous solution of ammonium cyanate,
CNONH_{4}, is evaporated, the salt is completely transformed into urea,
which has the same percentage composition. It would be difficult to
exaggerate the importance of this discovery. That a substance like urea,
which up to that time had only been met with as a product of processes
which take place in the animal body, should be formed in the laboratory
out of inorganic compounds, appeared to chemists then to be little less
than a miracle. To-day such facts are among the commonest of chemistry.
The many brilliant syntheses of well-known and valuable organic
compounds which have been made during the past twenty years are results
of this discovery of Woehler.
In 1823 he published a paper on secretion, in the urine, of substances
which are foreign to the animal organism, but which are brought into the
body.
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