Abstract
NO more striking illustration of the development of organic chemistry could be found than that presented by the growth of this popular German treatise. Appearing about 1880, as companion volume to a modest octavo text-book on inorganic chemistry, it rapidly acquired popularity and passed through numerous editions. As the contents swelled with each succeeding edition, it became necessary first to divide the book into two parts and finally to modify the format. Like many German scientific books it soon found an American translator and publisher, and has reached its third American edition. The present volume, it should be noted, is the first English edition, a term which we presume refers to the nationality of the publisher rather than to the greater purity of the vernacular of the last translator. Be that as it may, Richter's organic chemistry has passed out of the region,of textbooks. The theoretical part is condensed into a comparatively few pages at the beginning of the volume, and is of so sketchy and superficial a character as to possess little value for the student. Yet the subject, especially on the physical side in connection with structural problems, is one of growing interest and importance. This is a cardinal defect. On the other hand, the book is so crowded with facts as to form a kind of abridged “Beilstein.” It is divided into chapters containing the names of a large number of related compounds, an outline of the mode of their preparation, and an account of their more important physical and chemical properties. Occasionally there is a proper name attached to a compound or process, and sometimes a reference. It is rarely that one finds an English name, or, indeed, that of any other nationality than German. There is no reference to the modern method for preparing silicon alkyl compounds or to its author; no reference to the discoverer of oxalyl chloride, ketene, and the numerous azoimides, or to the mechanism of the formation of formic acid from glycerol and oxalic acid, though the process is given, or to the abnormal addition of bromine to maleic acid, which is wrongly described. English names, it appears from the preface, are purposely omitted for the remarkable reason that “references to German literature have been retained with the object of preserving to the student the advantages of the origin of the book; the English references will be otherwise readily obtainable by him.” If the references are not given, nor even the names of authors of these fundamental discoveries, it is difficult to see how they will be “readily obtainable.” No doubt there are advantages in having the origin of the book steadily thrust upon one as a stimulus to the British chemist; but it is to be hoped that there may be forthcoming a text-book-a real students' text-book-of organic chemistry which shall give | him a clear, critical, and suggestive review of the big problems of organic chemistry with which the names of many distinguished English chemists are linked. That the English organic chemist has pursued the experimental part of the subject with the object of elucidating theoretical rather than practical problems is readily explained by the fact that his activities on the industrial side have been necessarily restricted, and he has had little incentive up to the present to busy himself with the discovery of new classes of comirercially useful products.
Organic Chemistry, or Chemistry of the Carbon Compounds.
Victor von Richter. Volume i. Chemistry of the Aliphatic Series. Newly translated and revised from the German edition by Dr. P. E. Spielmann. Pp. xvi + 719. (London: Kegan Paul and Co., Ltd., 1915.) Price 21s. net.
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C., J. Organic Chemistry, or Chemistry of the Carbon Compounds . Nature 97, 54 (1916). https://doi.org/10.1038/097054a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/097054a0