4 Francis Humphreys Storer [March, 



Eliot and Storer crossed — one on top of the other — as an indication 

 that the order of the title page had no real meaning. 



The " Manual of Inorganic Chemistry " sold in considerable num- 

 bers for a long term of years, and is still in the market after several 

 revisions. It was at first the only book of the kind in the English 

 language ; and, indeed, there was no equivalent in any language ; but 

 within a few years many manuals appeared which were intended to 

 promote the same laboratory method of Instruction in chemistry. 

 A few years after its first appearance, one of the authors was one 

 day visiting Rugby School in England, and found that the Master 

 who taught chemistry at that famous School was using it in the 

 laboratory which he had set up for the teaching of chemistry. He 

 accounted for the presence of this American text-book in the School 

 by f rankly saying that he had not been able to find an English book 

 which answered the same purpose, or was conceived in the same 

 spirit. In 1869 Eliot became President of Harvard University, 

 and thereafter Storer made all the revisions of the two manuals he 

 and Eliot had written together.^ 



Judging from his " Cyclopedia of Quantitative Chemical Anal- 

 ysis," prepared during his stay at the Massachusetts Institute of 

 Technology, it is evident that the mind of Professor Storer was an 

 extremely practical one. This book is a silent witness to the work 

 of a pioneer, and from the preface we note that the object of writing 

 it was "not only to provide the Student and working chemist with 

 a comprehensive dictionary of quantitative processes, but to call the 

 attention of the chemical fraternity to the question of the possibility 

 of presenting this branch of chemical art in a more serviceable and 

 manageable form than has been customary hitherto. The experi- 

 ment is certainly worth the trying whether a definite System of classi- 

 fying substances in alphabetical order, and of referring each and 

 every process to the fundamental fact or principle upon which it 

 depends, will not greatly facilitate both the study and the practice 

 of analysis. . . . The tendency of all the works recently published 

 (1869) on quantitative analysis is towards condensation and ab- 



1 Dr. Charles W. Eliot was Professor of Analytical Chemistry and Metal- 

 lurgy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1865 to 1869, and from 

 then on, President of Harvard University. He was Professor Storer's brother- 

 in-law. 



