THE CHEMICAL PROBLEMS OF TO DAY.* 



By ViCTOii Meyer. 



Translated by L. H. FiiiEDBUKG.t 



When, a short time aj^o, I was called upou to speak before you, 1 

 gladly and zealously approached the work which such an occasion 

 seemed to call forth. It seemed to me that it would be au effort worthy 

 of this assemblage of scientific men to recall the permanent addi- 

 tions that chemistry has uuide in our day to the treasure of human 

 knowledge and to enumerate the problems which seem to lie nearest us 

 in the future. 



A science which, as such, is hardly older than the great European 

 revolution, the centennial of which we witnessed a few months ago, 

 and which in this short time has caused changes in our spiritual and 

 material life hardly less than those of the political revolution, such a 

 science, I have thought, may without temerity boast of its achieve 

 ments. 



And yet the chemist approaches such a task with a certain hesita- 

 tion from which the astronomer, the physicist, and the mathematician 

 are free. Has it not been in our own day tiiat the most prominent ora- 

 tor amongst German naturalists, one who astonishes us by the compre- 

 hensiveness of his knowledge, has adopted as his own Kant's judgment 

 on chemistry, namely, that "chemistry is a science, but not a science 

 in the highest sense of the word ; that is, a knowledge of nature reduced 

 to mathematical mechanics." And this di(!tum is accepted, not as a 

 blemish upon our science, but with the fullest aiul most perfect recog- 

 nition of the immense achievements which modern chemistry has regis- 

 tered as its own. »p 



But all of the marvellous successes of the atomic theory and of the 

 doctrine of structure, the synthesis of the most complicated organic 

 compounds, the blessings of an enlarged i)harmacop(eia, the potent 

 revolution in technological pro(;esses, the new and systematic methods 



* An address delivered at llcitlclboi;^ at the first ffeneral session of the sixty-sec- 

 ond meeting of the Association of German Natnralists and Physicians, September 

 18, 1H89. 



t From the Deutsche Rmuhchau, November, 1889. (Re-printed from the Journal 

 of the American Cheviical Society, September, 188'J, vol. xr, pp. 101-120.) 



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