Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/551

Rh chiefly nitro compounds, much work is done of a purely scientific nature, such as investigations on the chemical reactions and products of explosive mixtures, on the heat disengaged by their explosion, on the pressure of the gases produced, and on the duration of the explosive reaction. Thanks to the "Notes of Professor C. E. Munroe, of the United States Naval Academy, chemists are informed of the freshest novelties in this department, rendering further mention superfluous.

The researches of chemists in the aromatic series outweigh in both number and importance those in all other sections. The once despised refuse coal-tar has created an entirely new chemistry, and, in its products and derivatives, is by far the most promising field for investigators. The compounds of the aromatic series have afforded some of the most notable successes in synthetical chemistry, as well as some of the most useful substances for dyeing, for hygienic and medicinal purposes. The oil obtained in the dry distillation of bones, a subject of classic investigations by Anderson, of Glasgow, forty years ago, has recently acquired new interest; one of its constituents, pyridine (C6H5N), has been obtained in several ways which show that it bears the same relation to certain acids derived from natural alkaloids, such as quinine, nicotine, etc., that benzene does to benzoic and phthalic acids. These facts point to the possible artificial preparation of quinine at no distant day. This view of the constitution of the alkaloids is confirmed in many ways, notably by Ladenburg's discovery that piperidine, a base occurring in pepper, is hexahydrobenzene.

Professional chemists also acknowledge the marvelous success in unraveling the complications of isomerism, and the important aid afforded the study of isomeric bodies of the aromatic group by the doctrine of orientation. These rather technical details can receive, however, but brief mention, though a whole series of lectures could be devoted to the fascinating topic. Leopold Gmelin, when writing his "Hand-book of Chemistry," in 1827, requested organic chemists to stop making discoveries, or else he could never finish! And during the sixty years which have elapsed the activity in organic chemistry has been unceasing; yet the extraordinary number of facts now known is not so great as those which the prophetic eye sees disclosed by recently revealed lines of investigation.

The crowning glory of chemistry is the power of producing, in the laboratory, from inorganic matter, substances identical with those existing in the vegetable and animal kingdoms. Belief in the mysterious vital force operating in living beings received a rude shock at the hands of Wohler, sixty years ago, and successive triumphs in synthesis have dispelled it entirely, so far as non-organized bodies are concerned: "To-day we know that the same chemical laws rule animate and inanimate nature, and that any definite compound produced in the former can be prepared by synthesis as soon as its chemical