Abstract
THE man who jokingly said that he had to give up the study of chemistry when the science became so bulky that its Handbook required a wheelbarrow for its conveyance, expressed a truth which has been painfully felt by many scientific workers. With continual fresh additions to our knowledge, anything like a comprehensive grasp of a large science must become daily more and more difficult; but while this difficulty is generally felt, it occurs with special force in the science of chemistry. Chemistry, of all sciences, has perhaps the most unlimited capacity for development. Its subject is enormous, including the whole of nature, animate as well as inanimate. Nor is the chemist satisfied with studying the properties of matter as they are exhibited in the natural operations of the world around us, even this wide and attractive field of observation does not content him; he has made the grand discovery that the elements are his servants; that he can at will take to pieces in his laboratory the compounds found in nature, and construct therefrom a multitude of new bodies. Chemistry may thus be said to produce the matter upon which it feeds; the extent to which the production of new compounds can be carried seems practically unlimited, and these become, in most cases, the starting points of fresh investigations. We have here the principal cause of the wonderful development of modern chemistry; armed with such power, it cannot but abound in valuable discoveries, and furnish, at all times, copious results. As a consequence of this rapid development of the science, it has become a matter of the greatest difficulty for the investigator, the teacher, or the manufacturer, to keep pace with the daily progress of discovery; and improvement, and ignorance of the results already obtained in any department, naturally necessitates a loss of valuable time and labour to those engaged on the subject. The bulk and variety of chemical literature are not, however, the only obstacles to the student; the difficulty is greatly increased to an Englishman by the fact that the greater part of this literature is published on the Continent, and appears in a variety of languages with which the average Englishman has but little acquaintance.
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The Chemical Society's Journal . Nature 9, 377–378 (1874). https://doi.org/10.1038/009377a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/009377a0