Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/550

534 and yet these operations conducted in the private laboratory of a man of genius have been of direct benefit to mankind, setting free thousands of acres for the production of breadstuff's, and establishing industries employing a multitude of workmen. In a word, these abstruse phrases describe the artificial production of alizarine, the valuable coloring matter of madder.

The polysyllabic nomenclature now prevailing expresses to the chemical mind the innate structural composition of the body named; of late years the words are formed by joining syllables to an almost indefinite extent, and a distinguished chemist has recently urged the advantages of empiric names in place of the unwieldy system. Whether Dr. Odling's plea will produce a reaction in favor of empiric names remains to be seen.

To enter into details concerning the recent progress of organic chemistry, and to make them intelligible to an audience not composed of well-read professional chemists, is an undertaking of doubtful success; we shall content ourselves chiefly with generalities.

That remarkable product of nature, petroleum, continues to occupy the studies of chemists at home and abroad. Newly invented methods of fractional distillation have disclosed previously unsuspected constituents and peculiarities. Lachowitz has found in the petroleum of Galicia several members of the aromatic series; Mendelejeff has noticed abnormal relations between the specific gravity and boiling-points of successive fractions in distilling American petroleum. The various commercial products from crude petroleum, rhigolene, vaseline, paraffin, etc., continually find new and useful applications, their names being household words.

The industrial and scientific novelties in the important groups of oils and fats, alcohols, and acids, can not be specified. After cane sugar, glucose is receiving the most attention; in the United States and Germany are sixty manufactories of the various grades of starch sugar, the annual home production alone being valued at ten million dollars. Glucose is extensively used as a substitute for cane-sugar in the manufacture of table-syrup, in brewing, in confectionery, in making artificial honey, and in adulterating cane-sugar, as well as in many minor applications. Recent experiments by Dr. Duggan, of Baltimore, show that glucose is in no way inferior to cane-sugar in healthfulness. Much work has been done on sorghum by Dr. Peter Collier, and the first complete examination of maple-sugar has lately been made by Professor Wiley, of the Department of Agriculture. Lovers of the latter sweet will be pleased to learn that it can be made by adding to a mixture of glucose and cane-sugar a patented extract of hickory bark which imitates the desired flavor.

The great demand for high explosives as adjuncts to engineering, mining, and military operations, occasions constant experimentation; besides the invention of mere empiric mixtures of known substances,