Thermal Chemistry

Abstract

A PAPER was published in this journal a short time ago calling attention to “The Backward State of Chemistry in England” (vol. xxviii. p. 613); the writer regrets that so little attention is paid to the chemistry of the carbon compounds, and that so much time is spent in our chemical schools in elementary and routine instruction. In the second of these regrets I can thoroughly sympathise; our so-called students of chemistry are becoming mere machines which perform, and generally perform badly, mechanical processes known as qualitative and quantitative analyses. We hear complaints from physical laboratories that practical physics is taught in an unsystematic manner; we sometimes have comparisons drawn between the desultory methods of teaching pursued in these laboratories and the orderly and systematic courses of practical chemistry conducted in the workrooms of the sister science. But I am afraid it is rather the chemist who is to be pitied: his method is too methodical; it seems to succeed because it neglects the really scientific aspects of chemistry. Chemistry is a great branch of science; but what is the so-called practical chemistry of the schools or the examination? It is but a weary round of dull repetition; it consists of obtaining black precipitates, and yellow precipitates, and colourless precipitates, precipitates which are soluble and those which are insoluble; it occupies itself with filtering and washing, and drying, and burning, and weighing; it has little or no connection with the problems which belong to the science of chemistry. But when the author of the article to which reference has been made attributes the backward state of chemistry in England to the comparatively small amount of attention which is given to organic chemistry, I find myself unable to agree with him. I think we are apt to be dazzled by such things as the synthesis of indigo, or the artificial manufacture of alizarin: we forget to inquire whether the study of organic chemistry has in recent years added any great general principle to chemical science. The conception of the valency of elementary atoms is certainly an outcome of the study of the carbon compounds, or rather of the application of the atomic theory to this study; but have we not of late made too much of this conception? has it not rather stopped than aided inquiry? is it not time we had given up our “bonds,” our “units of affinity,” which are chiefly remarkable as being changeable almost at pleasure? Organic chemistry, as pursued in the German laboratories, it seems to me, has almost if not quite entered on the same path as that which has led qualitative and quantitative analysis to so sad a fall: it is in danger of ceasing to be a branch of science and of becoming an art of manufacture. Any student who goes through the course of preparation of organic compounds, systematised so well in the laboratories of the German universities and elsewhere, is ready to manufacture new compounds by the score; the difficulty consists in not making such compounds. There are whispers abroad that he who is not in the trade is regarded by the German professors as “no chemist.”

Thermochemische Untersuchungen.

Von Julius Thomsen, Dr. Phil, et Med. &c. Volumes I., II., and III. (Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1882–83.)