system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Citing someone that cited someone

My thesis supervisor gave me someone’s PhD thesis to take a look at their results.

I’m looking through their references and  one is cited like this:
“Wohler Grundriss der Organischem Chemie (1840), cited by R. Bunsen, Ann. Chim. Phys. (1848)”

Why not just put “R. Bunsen, Ann. Chim. Phys. (1848)”?
gpt
Citing R bunsen would be incorrect, because the original citation is Grundiss.

The reason it's been done like this is almost certainly because the person doing the citing either couldn't access the 1840 paper, or couldn't read it in German, so are relying on a translation or description of the findings made by Bunsen. So Grundiss did the work, but the Bunsen papers interpretation is what's being used.