The father of Dumas was a man of considerable culture; he gave his son as good an education as could be obtained in the little town of his birth. At the age of fourteen young Dumas was a good classical scholar, and had acquired a fair knowledge of natural science. But for his deficiency in mathematics he would probably have entered for the examination which admitted those who passed it to join the French navy. But before he had made good his mathematical deficiencies the troublous nature of the times (1814-15) obliged his parents to think of some other profession for their son which would entail less sacrifice on their part.
Like his great fellow-worker in after life he was apprenticed to an apothecary, and like him also, he soon forsook this sphere of usefulness.
Desirous of better opportunities for the study of science, and overpowered by the miseries which war had brought upon the district of his birth, Dumas persuaded his father to allow him to go to Geneva. At Geneva Dumas found an atmosphere more suited to his scientific progress; chemistry, physics, botany, and other branches of natural science were taught by men whose names were everywhere known. He began experiments in chemistry with the crudest and most limited apparatus, but even with these he made discoveries which afterwards led to important work on the volumes occupied by the atoms of elementary substances.
About the year 1818 Dumas became acquainted with Dr. J. L. Prévost, who had returned from studying in many of the most famous medical schools of Europe. Invited by Prévost to join in an investigation requiring medical, botanical and chemical knowledge, Dumas now began a series of researches which soon passed into the domain of animal physiology, and by the prosecution of which under many difficulties he laid the foundations of his future fame.
But along with his physiological work Dumas carried on a research into the expansion of various ethers. This necessitated the preparation of a series of ethers in a state of purity; but so difficult did Dumas find this to be, so much time did he consume in this preliminary work, and so interested did he become in the chemical part of the investigation, that he abandoned the experiments on expansion, and set himself to solve some of the problems presented by the composition and chemical properties of the ethers.