Abstract
THIS is a book about which it is impossible to get up any feeling of enthusiasm; but one cannot resist a sense of wonder and admiration at the patient, plodding spirit in which the compiler must have set about his weary task, and carried it on through months or years of labour to the dreary end. Of course he is an American. In no other nation of the earth using or abusing the English tongue would a man have been found to undertake such an enterprise; but why the busy, rushing life of that great country across the Atlantic should breed so many compilers of catalogues and bibliographies and indexes, especially of physical science, of books which Charles Lamb would have called no books, biblia a-biblia, it seems hard to say. The world ought to feel grateful to them, but usually it does not. It often uses such cyclopædias, though ready enough to grumble if it finds them less than perfect. In this volume the only smack of literary flavour is to be found in the preface, wherein the extract from “Peter Shaw's Chemical Lectures, publickly read at London in 1731 and 1732,”shows that the plan of such a book was foreshadowed long before its accomplishment. For, according to the author, the first work that undertook to carry out the idea in its entirety was produced by Prof. F. H. Storer in 1864. All chemists are familiar with Storer's “First Outlines of a Dictionary of Solubilities of Chemical Substances,” though long since out of print. It will at once be noticed that there is an important difference in the titles of the two works. Dr. Comey is, however, justified in using the expression “chemical solubilities,” inasmuch as he does not confine his work to data concerning solutions in water and alcohol or other neutral solvents, but includes the action, for example, of acids upon metals, and the effects of various liquids, such as solutions of potash and aqueous acids. Moreover, certain physical facts are mentioned, such as changes of temperature on dilution, also any data obtainable regarding the boiling-points of solutions, and tables giving the specific gravities of aqueous solutions.
A Dictionary of Chemical Solubilities. Inorganic.
By Arthur Messinger Comey Pp. xx + 515. (London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1896.)
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A Dictionary of Chemical Solubilities Inorganic. Nature 54, 244 (1896). https://doi.org/10.1038/054244a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/054244a0