Mitscherlich was educated at Jever in the school directed by the historian F. C. Schlosser, who encouraged him to apply himself to the liberal arts.
In 1811 Mitscherlich entered the University of Heidelberg, where he studied Oriental languages; he continued this pursuit at the University of Paris, which he entered in 1813. He then turned to the study of medicine at Göttingen in 1817, where he became interested in crystallography.
From 1818 to 1820 Mitscherlich worked in the Berlin laboratory of the German botanist Heinrich F. Link, where he first undertook the study of arsenates and phosphates. While working on arsenates and phosphates, he realized that substances of a similar composition often have the same crystalline form, and from this he formulated, in 1819, his law of isomorphism. This relationship was used by Berzelius in early attempts to assign relative masses to the elements which led to a successful creation of the periodic table by Mendeleev and Meyer half a century later.
Mitscherlich also discovered selenic acid (1827), named benzene, and showed, in 1834, that if benzene reacts with nitric acid it forms nitrobenzene.
Eilhard Mitscherlich - German Scientist
