CHEMICAL SCIENCE. 



THOUGHTS ON THE PROGRESS OF CHEMICAL SCIENCE. 



THE following is an abstract of an address delivered by Sir John Herschel, 

 on assuming the chair of the chemical section of the British Association, at 

 its last meeting, 1858. After briefly alluding to the rapid progress of chem- 

 istry in his own time, he desired " to put in a word of reclamation against 

 the system of notation into which chemists, who for the most part are not 

 algebraists, have fallen, in expresing their atomic formula!. These formulae 

 have been gradually taking on a character more and more repulsive to the 

 algebraical eye. There is a principle which I think ought to be borne in 

 mind in framing the conventional notations as well as nomenclatures of 

 every science, at every new step in its progress, viz., that as sciences do 

 not stand alone, but exist in mutual relations to each other as it is for their 

 common interest that there should exist among them a system of free com- 

 munication on their frontier points the language they use and the signs 

 they employ should be framed in such a way as at least not to contradict each 

 other. As the atomic formulas used by the chemist are not merely symbolic 

 of the mode in which atoms are grouped, but are intended also to express 

 numerical relations, indicative of the aggregate weights of the several atoms 

 in each group, and the several groups in each compound, it is distressing to 

 the algebraist to find that he cannot interpret a chemical formula (I mean in 

 its numerical application) according to the received rules of arithmetical 

 computation. In a paper which I published a long time ago on the Hypo- 

 sulphites, I was particularly careful to use a mode of notation which, while 

 perfectly clear in its chemical sense, and fully expressing the relations of the 

 groupings I allude to, accommodated itself at the same time perfectly well to 

 numerical computation no symbol being in any case juxtaposed, or in any 

 way inter-combined with one another, so as to violate the strict algebraical 

 meaning of the formula. This system seemed for a while likely to be gener- 

 ally adopted ; but it has been more and more departed from, and I think with 

 a manifest corresponding departure from intelligibility. The time is, perhaps, 

 not so very far distant, when, from a knowledge of the family to which a chem- 

 ical element belongs, and its order in that family, we may be able to predict 

 with confidence the system of groups into which it is capable of entering, 

 and the part it will play in the combination. A great step in this direction 

 seems to me to have been lately made by Prof. Cooke, of the United States 

 (in a memoir which forms part of the 5th volume of the Memoirs of the 

 American Academy of Arts and Sciences), to extend and carry out the clas- 



