CHEMISTRY. 



By H. Carrington Bolton, Ph. D., 



Professor of Chemistri/ in Trinity College, Hartford, Conn. 



The year 1882 is marked by great industry in all departments of 

 chemistry; no startling announcements have been made, but several 

 extremely interesting syntheses of organic bodies have been accom- 

 plished, viz, tyrosine and uric acid, both of the animal organism. Great 

 activity is noted in the revision of the atomic weights. Progress has 

 been made in unraveling the knotty problem of ihe rare earths in cerite, 

 samarskite, and gadolinite, but no satisfactory conclusions have been 

 reached as to the existence of the larger number of elementary bodies 

 announced since 1877c 



In the brief space at our disposal we can barely note the salient fea- 

 tures of the year's work in a series of short abstracts, and these we con- 

 fine chiefly to pure chemistry, paying little attention to analytical and 

 industrial chemistry. Periodical literature, devoted exclusively to chem- 

 istry and its applications, is becoming voluminous ; the fifteen principal 

 journals of America, England, France, and Germany publish annually 

 about 18,000 images; in this rough estimate journals of physics and 

 transactions of societies are not included, and both classes of serials 

 contain much chemical material. We need hardly say that no attempt 

 is made in the following pages to chronicle the prodigious amount and 

 varietj^ of work contained in these and other sources of information. 



PHYSICAL AND INORGANIC CHEMISTRY. 



On the Reciprocal Solutions of Liquids. — Wladimir Alexejeff has de- 

 voted eight years to a study of the mutual solutions of mixed liquids, 

 anil he finds that the hypothesis proposed by Dossios is subject to ex- 

 ceptions. The latter stated that the mutual solubility of liquids in- 

 creases with the rise in temperature, but Alexejefl' finds that in certain 

 bodies (isobutyl alcohol, for example) the solubility diminishes with an 

 increase of temperature. He also discovers that the solubility decreases 

 to a definite point and then increases again, or, in other words, that a 

 minimum of solubility exists, just as certain solids have a maximum of 

 solubility. 



When phenol and water are brought together two layers form; the 

 lower is a solution of i)henol in water, the upper a solution of water in 



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