Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/683

 Rh qualitative analysis, and there is no other way of making one's self acquainted with the various chemical properties of a body than by first producing it out of the raw material, and then converting it into its numerous compounds and so becoming acquainted with them.

By ordinary analysis one does not learn by experience what an important means of separation crystallization is in skillful hands; and just as little the value of an acquaintance with the peculiarities of different solvents. Consider only an extract of a plant or of flesh which contains half a dozen crystalline bodies in very small quantities imbedded in extraneous matter, which almost entirely masks the properties of the others; and yet, in this magma, we can recognize by means of chemical reactions the peculiarities of every single body in the mixed mass, and learn to distinguish what is a product of decomposition and what is not, in order to be able to separate them afterward by means which will exert no decomposing influence. An example of the great difiiculty of finding the right way in such researches is afforded by the analysis of bile by Berzelius. Of all the numerous substances which he has described as its constituents no one is, properly speaking, contained in the natural bile.

An extremely short time had been sufficient for the famous pupils of the Swedish master to give a wonderful degree of perfection to mineral analysis, which depends on an accurate knowledge of the properties of inorganic bodies; their compounds and their behavior to each other were studied in all directions by the Swedish school with a keenness quite unusual previously and even now unsurpassed. Physical chemistry, which investigates the uniform relations between physical properties and chemical composition, had already gained a firm foundation by the discoveries of Gay-Lussac and von Humboldt on the combining proportions of bodies in the gaseous state, and those of Mitscherlich on the relations between crystalline form and chemical composition; and in chemical proportions the structure appeared to have received its coping-stones and to stand forth completed. All that foreign countries had acquired in by-gone times in the way of discoveries now yielded rich fruit also in Germany.

Organic chemistry—or what is now called organic chemistry—had then no existence. It is true that Thenard and Gay-Lussac, Berzelius, Prout, and Dobereiner, had already laid the foundations of organic analysis, but even the great investigations of Chevreul upon the fatty bodies excited but little attention for many years. Inorganic chemistry demanded too much attention, and, in fact, monopolized the best energies.

The bent which I acquired in Paris was in a quite different direction. Through the work which Gay-Lussac had done with