Eilhard Mitscherlich was educated at Jever by the historian Friedrich Christoph Schlosser, and in 1811 went to the University of Heidelberg devoting himself to philology, with an emphasis on the Persian language.

[3] The abdication of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1814 put an end to this, and Mitscherlich resolved to study medicine in order that he might enjoy that freedom of travel usually allowed in the East to physicians.

From his days in Göttingen dates the treatise on certain parts of Eurasian history, compiled from manuscripts found in the university library and published in Persian and Latin in 1814, under the title Mirchondi historia Thaheridarum historicis nostris hucusque incognitorum Persiae principum.

[4] In that same year Berzelius suggested Mitscherlich to the Prussian education minister Karl vom Stein zum Altenstein as successor to Martin Heinrich Klaproth at the University of Berlin.

Altenstein did not immediately carry out this suggestion, but he obtained for Mitscherlich a government grant to enable him to continue his studies in Berzelius' laboratory at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm.

[5][6] In 1833 Mitscherlich made a series of careful determinations of the vapor densities of a large number of volatile substances, confirming the law of Gay-Lussac.

[9] He obtained selenic acid in 1827 and showed that its salts are isomorphous with the sulphates, while a few years later he proved that the same thing is true of the manganates and the sulfates, and of the permanganates and the perchlorates.

[14] Original: Jag skall derföre, för att begagna en i kemien välkänd härledning, kalla den kroppars katalytiska kraft, sönderdelning genom denna kraft katalys, likasom vi med ordet analys beteckna åtskiljandet af kroppars beståndsdelar medelst den vanliga kemiska frändskapen.Translation: I shall, therefore, to employ a well-known derivation in chemistry, call [the catalytic] bodies [i.e., substances] the catalytic force and the decomposition of [other] bodies by this force catalysis, just as we signify by the word analysis the separation of the constituents of bodies by the usual chemical affinities.