20 ANNUAL OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERT. 



extensive and as fertile* as those we were in possession of before, to the patri- 

 mony of Science. 



It is indeed singular, that whilst the supposed elements of mineral bodies 

 are very numerous, the combinations between them should be comparatively 

 few; whereas amongst those of vegetable and animal origin, where the ultimate 

 elements are so limited in point of number, the combinations which they form 

 appear almost infinite. Carbon and hydrogen, for instance, constitute, as it 

 were, the keystone of every organic fabric ; whilst oxygen, nitrogen, and less 

 frequently sulphur and phosphorus, serve almost alone to build up their super- 

 structure. And yet what an infinity of products is brought about by ringing the 

 changes upon this scanty alphabet ! Even one series of bodies alone, that known 

 by the name of the Fatty Acids, comprises several hundred well ascertained 

 combinations, founded however upon a single class of hydro-carbons or com- 

 pound radicals, in which the carbon and hydrogen stand to each other in equal 

 atomic proportions, and are in each case acidified by the same number of 

 equivalents of oxygen. These acids are all monobasic, or combined with only 

 one proportion of base ; but add to any one of them two equivalents of car- 

 bonic acid, and you obtain a member of a second series, which is bibasic, or 

 is capable of forming two classes of salts. The above, therefore, constitute a 

 double series, as it were, of organic acids, the members of which are mutually 

 related in the manner pointed out, and differ from each other in their mode 

 of combining according to the relation between their respective elements. 

 But already, by the labors of Hofmann and of other chemists, two other double 

 series of acids, the one monobasic, the other bibasic, mutually related exactly 

 in the same manner as those above, have been brought to light ; each series 

 no doubt characterized by an equally numerous appendage of alcohols, of 

 asthers, and of aldehydes, to say nothing of the secondary compounds result- 

 ing from the union of each of these bodies with others. 



Hence, the more insight we obtain into the chemistry of organic substances, 

 the more we become bewildered with their complexity ; and in investigating 

 these phenomena, find ourselves in the condition of the explorer of a new con- 

 tinent, who, although he might see the same sun over his head, the same 

 ocean rolling at his feet, the same geological structure in the rocks that were 

 piled around him, and was thus assured that he still continued a denizen of 

 his own planet, and subject to those physical laws to which he had been 

 before amenable, yet at every step he took was met by some novel object, and. 

 startled with some strange and portentous production of Nature's fecundity. 

 Even so the chemist of the present day, whilst he recognises in the world of 

 organic life the same general laws which prevail throughout the mineral king- 

 dom, is nevertheless astonished and perplexed by the multiplicity of new 

 bodies that present themselves, the wondrous changes in them resulting from 

 slight differences in molecular arrangement, and the simple nature of the 

 machinery by which such complicated effects are brought about. And as the 

 New "World might never have been discovered, or, at all events, would not 

 have been brought under our subjection, without those improvements in naval 

 architecture, which had taken place prior to the age of Columbus, so the 



rets of organic chemistry would have long remained unelicited, but for the 



