IV 

 ORGANIC CHEMISTRY 



THE suggestion that a distinction might 

 be made between the chemistry of 

 minerals and that of substances formed 

 by living organisms seems to have been first 

 made in 1675, when Lemery, a French chemist, 

 published a general treatise on chemistry. In 

 this work the subject was treated in the three 

 main divisions of Vegetable, Animal, and Mineral 

 Chemistry ; but the distinction seems to have 

 been adopted merely for convenience of handling 

 the subject and evidently was not based on any 

 precise chemical difference between the three 

 groups. The author was, however, clearly aware 

 that the substances of vegetable or animal origin 

 were more complex than those derived from 

 minerals. 



Very little progress was made until more than 

 a hundred years later, when the conception of 

 chemical elements and the methods of detecting 

 these had been developed. Thus about the year 

 1790 Lavoisier reported that substances of animal 

 or vegetable origin differed from mineral sub- 

 stances by the presence of carbon ; they also 



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