Physico-Chemical Methods

Abstract

FOR what qualities does one look in a volume of some eight hundred pages, weighing a generous three and a half pounds, and bearing the title “Physico-Chemical Methods”? Such a work might be no more than an orthodox laboratory manualpresumably of an advanced and critical type, dealing, in common with its fellows, with a description of certain orthodox experiments, and prefaced by a more or less perfunctory account of general principles and processes. These manuals, provided for the members of a generation which may plod, with such enthusiasm as their education has left them, through a series of standardised experiments in preparation for the inevitable standardised examination, do not provide material assistance for the serious researcher. His outlook is very different; his problems are not so clear cut; many of the processes which he has learnt require serious modification; he is called on to use instruments the range and technique of which are outside those of the instruments to which he has hitherto been accustomed; and if he has been trained as a chemist, he may have to learn that such fundamental processes as that of taking a temperature accurately are not so simple as they seem to be. The physicist, on the other hand, who adventures into physico-chemical research, is apt to treat a little too light-heartedly the question of the purity and purification of the compounds with which he has to deal.

Physico-Chemical Methods.

By Prof. Joseph Reilly Prof. William Norman Rae. Second edition, revised. Pp. xv + 822. (London: Methuen and Co., Ltd., 1933.) 42s. net.