Abstract
TO the stronger minds among men of science, exercised in abstract conception, and independent of such aids to the imagination as are embodied in drawings of atomic arrangements, models of molecules and even formulæ of atomic groupings, there is no doubt something almost repulsive in the representation of the molecule as a machine, a combination of mechanical powers. It is nearly forty years since the screw was suggested (by Pasteur) as a symbol of the atomic arrangement in tartaric acid, and now we find the lever introduced in such phrases as “the moment of a chain of atoms varying with its length.” The wheel-and-axle has not yet been pressed into the service to explain atomic vagaries; and of the philosopher who shall venture to take this further step, the abstract thinkers of to-day will surely say, as Kolbe said of the chemist who was destined to succeed him in his professorial chair at Leipzig: “Hereby he declares that he has left the ranks of men of science, and has gone over to the camp of those philosophers of ill-omen, who are separated from the spiritualists by only a very thin medium!”
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References
Science Progress, February 1896.
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EILOART, A. Progress in Stereochemistry. Nature 54, 321–324 (1896). https://doi.org/10.1038/054321a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/054321a0