Justus Liebig was born on May 12, 1803 in Darmstadt as the son of a “materialist” (druggist). After dropping out of preparatory school in 1817/1818, he worked as an apprentice in a pharmacy in Heppenheim on Bergstraße. Instead of completing the apprenticeship, however, he began to study chemistry at the Prussian university founded in Bonn in 1818, under Karl Wilhelm Kastner (1783–1857), whom he followed to the University in Erlangen after Kastner’s appointment there. Kastner himself, who had business and personal ties with Liebig’s father, probably cleared the way for a son without a school-leaving certificate to study. The young University of Bonn was probably more liberal than universities with a longstanding tradition behind them. His membership in a forbidden fraternity and participation in student demonstrations in Erlangen led to him being forced to leave the city and return to Darmstadt in 1822. On Kastner’s recommendation, he was able to resume his studies in Paris with a scholarship from Grand Duke Ludwig I of Hesse-Darmstadt (1753–1830), where he attended lectures by Dulong, Thénard, and Gay-Lussac, among others. Liebig continued to pursue his investigations on fulminating mercury there and isolated fulminic acid. Gay-Lussac presented Liebig’s investigations on July 28, 1823, at a meeting of the Paris Academy of Sciences. Alexander von Humboldt also attended this meeting and subsequently recommended Liebig to Grand Duke Ludwig I for a professorship at the University of Giessen. Liebig had meanwhile been conferred a doctoral title at the University of Erlangen in absentia.