Christian Friedrich Schoenbein to Faraday   17 October 1852

My dear Faraday

I trust you received in due time the letter I sent you through Dr. Whewell some months ago¹. Now I avail myself of a friend going to London to forward to you a paper of mine², which I hope will not remain a sealed book to you. If you should feel curious to decipher that whimsical letter I once wrote you about oxigen³, get the memoir translated by some friend of your’s and you will perhaps be interested in the matter as it regards some of your most important discoveries.

Entertaining the notion that in many if not in all cases the color exhibited by oxycompounds is due to the oxigen contained in them, or to express myself more distinctly, to a peculiar chemical condition of that body, I have continued my researches on the subject and obtained a number of results which I do not hesitate to call highly curious and striking. Far be it from me to think, on that account, my hypothesis correct and proved; but the fact is that I owe the discovery of a number of remarkable phenomena solely and exclusively to the conjecture mentioned. I am nearly sure that you will be pleased to repeat the experiments, for either by mere physical means or by chemical ones you may make and unmake or change the color of certain substances without altering the chemical constitution of those matters. To my opinion, that wonder is performed by changing the chemical condition of the oxigen of the oxycompound.

I cannot help thinking that the colors of substances, which up to this present moment have been very slightly treated (in a chemical point of view) will one day become highly important to chemical science and be rendered the means to discover the most delicate and interesting changes taking place in the chemical condition of bodies. In more than one respect the color of bodies may be considered the most obvious “signatura rerum”⁴, as the revealer of the most wonderful actions going on in the innermost recesses of substances, as the indicator of the most elementary functions of what we call ponderable matter. But alas! Whilst we are pleased with and wonder at that rich field of chromatic phenomena, which continually strikes our eye, we know as yet little or nothing of the connexion which certainly exists between the chemical nature of bodies and the influence it exerts upon light. We must try to dissipate that thick darkness which still hangs about and obscures the most luminous phenomena. Clearing up but the smallest part of that vastly important subject would be of more scientific value, I think, than discovering thousand and thousand new organic compounds, things which I cannot help considering in the same light as I do the infinite number of figures which may [be] produced by the caleidoscope.

What would the world say of a man, who should take the trouble to shake for whole years that plaything and de[s]cribe minutely all the shapes (pretty as they might be) he had obtained from his operation!

You know, I am no great admirer of the present state of Chemistry, and of the Ideas leading the researches made upon that field. Atoms, weight, ratio of quantities, endless production, and formula of compounds, i.e. the “caput mortuum”⁵ of nature are the principal if not the only subjects with which the majority of our Chymists know to deal. Force power, action, life in fact, are as it were phantoms to them, disliked if not hated. The world being a system of Ideas, its very essence power and intellect, how can we expect great things from men who so much mistake the nature of nature.

In perusing what is written above I find it is not worth of being sent over the water, but having no more time to write another letter, you must take it as it is and excuse my random talking. Mrs. Schoenbein and the Children are well and beg to be kindly remembered to you. My best compliments to Mrs. Faraday and to you the assurance that I shall for ever remain

Yours | most truly | C.F. Schoenbein

Bâle Oct. 17, 1852.