Annual Reports on the Progress of Chemistry for 1918, issued by the Chemical Society

Abstract

THESE important volumes have been issued annually by the Chemical Society since 1905. Their object is to present an epitome of the principal definite steps in advance which have been accomplished in the preceding year for the benefit of workers or students in pure or applied science. They are not popular in any sense of the word. During the war there was necessarily some slackening in the production of results bearing chiefly on purely scientific problems, and the volume for 1918 is somewhat thinner than the volumes issued in previous years. Nevertheless, some advances can be recorded. For very many years the mass of the atom has been regarded as determining its chief properties. This is embodied in Mendeléeff's periodic scheme familiar to every chemist. It is therefore not surprising to find that the new doctrine which assumes some knowledge of the internal constitution of the atom should be rather slowly accepted. But chemical physics or physical chemistry is a department of knowledge which is undergoing rather rapid and bewildering change consequent on advances in positive knowledge. Absorption spectra, the properties of colloids, ionisation and the nature of ions, the nature and source of osmotic pressure, and the relations of isotopes are all. subjects of supreme interest, many of which have assumed a totally new form, or have even been recognised only within the last twenty years. The chemical student of the future will need to be a fairly good mathematician if he hopes to follow all that is going on in these several directions. Fortunately there are other large fields of work still open in which this is not an essential condition and where great successes continue to be scored, especially in constitutional and synthetic organic chemistry and its applications to problems in physiology, animal and vegetable. These are all dealt with under appropriate heads in this volume of reports.

Annual Reports on the Progress of Chemistry for 1918, issued by the Chemical Society.

Vol. xv. Pp. ix + 240. (London: Gurney and Jackson, 1919.) Price 4s. 6d. net.