BERTHELOT, MARCELLIN PIERRE EUGENE French chemist and politician, was born at Paris on Oct. 29, 1827, being the son of a doctor. In 1851 he became a member of the staff of the College de France as assistant to A. J. Balard, his former master, and about the same time he began his lifelong friendship with Ernest Renan. In 1854 he made his reputation by his doctoral thesis, Sur les combinaisons de la glycerine avec les acides, which described a series of beauti ful researches in continuation and amplification of M. E. Chev reul's classical work. In 1859 he was appointed professor of organic chemistry at the Ecole Superieure de Pharmacie, and in 1865 he accepted the new chair of organic chemistry, which was specially created for his benefit at the College de France. He became a member of the Academy of Medicine in 1863 and ten years afterwards entered the Academy of Sciences, of which he became perpetual secretary in 1889 in succession to Louis Pasteur. He was appointed inspector-general of higher education in 1876, and after his election as life senator in 1881 he continued to take an active interest in educational questions, especially as affected by compulsory military service. In the Goblet ministry of 1886-87 he was minister of public instruction, and in the Bourgeois cabinet of 1895-96 he held the portfolio for foreign affairs. His scientific jubilee was celebrated in Paris in Igor. He died sud denly, immediately after the death of his wife, on March 18, 1907, at Paris, and with her was buried in the Pantheon.
He vigorously opposed the generally accepted belief that the formation of organic substances required the intervention of vital activity. His investigations on the synthesis of organic corn pounds were published in numerous papers and books, includ ing Chimie organique f ondee sur la synthese (186o) and Les Carbures d'hydrogene (Igo 1) . Again he held that chemical phe nomena are not governed by any peculiar laws special to them selves, but are explicable in terms of the general laws of mechanics that are in operation throughout the universe; and this view he developed, with the aid of thousands of experiments, in his Mecanique chimique (1878) and his Thermochimie (1897). This branch of study naturally conducted him to the investigation of explosives, and on the theoretical side led to the results published in his work Sur la force de la poudre et des matieres explosives (1872), while on the practical side it enabled him to render im portant services to his country as president of the scientific de fence committee during the siege of Paris in 1870-71 and subse quently as chief of the French explosives committee.
His other works include: Les Origines de l'alchimie (i885) ; Intro duction a l'etude de la chimie des anciens et du moyen age (1889) ; publishing translations of various old Greek, Syriac, and Arabic treatises on alchemy and chemistry (Collection des anciens alchimistes grecs, 1887-88, and La Chimie au moyen age (1893) ; Science et philosophie (1886), which contains a well-known letter to Renan on Science ideale et la science positive" ; La Revolution chimique, Lavoisier (189o) ; Science et morale (1897), and numerous articles in La Grande Encyclopedie, which he helped to establish.