Were they liquids or particles? Biological or chemical?
TMV was crystallized in 1935 by Wendell Stanley and shown to be largely protein. Stanley demonstrated that viruses can be analyzed according the the laws of chemistry, as well as biology.
Wendell Stanley
Bawden & Pirie, in 1936, crystallized tomato bushy stunt virus and TMV and found that they contained phosphorous and concluded that the viruses were nucleoproteins. This finding set the stage for nucleic acid analyses.
Virus Crystal