The Chemistry of Commerce A Simple Interpretation of some New Chemistry in its Relation to Modern Industry

Abstract

THE author of the book with this alliterative and not very apt title is a teacher of chemical technology in a university of one of the western States of North America. He appears to have spent a year's leave in Europe in making himself more or less familiar with certain manufacturing processes depending upon more or less recondite facts of modern chemistry, and he is constrained to publish what he has learnt in the hope of convincing the American manufacturer, in particular, that modern science is “absolutely applicable” to the economy and progress of his operations. He was the more encouraged to put forth the present attempt for the reason that, as he tells us, a former venture of his received “words of appreciation” from mining engineers in South Africa and school teachers in China, as well as from captains of the navy and captains of industry. From which we may infer that the professor of industrial chemistry at the University of Kansas, of whose literary productions we confess we were hitherto in complete ignorance, is in reality one of the most widely-read authors of his time.

The Chemistry of Commerce. A Simple Interpretation of some New Chemistry in its Relation to Modern Industry.

By Robert Kennedy Duncan. Pp. x + 263. (London and New York: Harper and Brothers, 1907.)