TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE, 



IN presenting Lehmann' s "Physiological Chemistry' 5 to the 

 Members of the Cavendish Society, I feel that it would be super- 

 fluous to offer any remarks on the author's high reputation as a 

 general cultivator of chemical science ; to recapitulate his numerous 

 and important contributions to physiological chemistry ; or to refer 

 to the very favourable reception which this work has received in 

 Germany. 



The first edition of this volume appeared in 1841, and the 

 second (from which this translation is executed) in the beginning 

 of last year.* If, during that interval, the progress of physiological 

 chemistry has been so rapid as to necessitate the entire remodelling 

 of the work (see p. vii), the shorter period that has elapsed since 

 the appearance of the second edition has been proportionally 

 fruitful in important discoveries. Need I advert to the detection 

 of succinic acid as a morbid product in the human organism, to 

 the later researches of Schwartz on hippuric acid and the hippu-~ 

 rates, to the detection of hippuric acid in the blood of the ox, and 

 of oxalic acid in diseased human blood, to the discovery of hypo- 

 xanthine and inosite, or to Liebig's important memoir on the fibrin 

 of muscular fibre ? 



As Professor Lehmann will probably append a supplement to 

 his third and concluding volume, so as to embrace a notice of the 

 discoveries which have been made during the progress of publica- 

 tion, I have abstained from anything beyond the very briefest 

 enunciation of any of these recently discovered facts, and have 

 frequently contented myself with a mere reference to the original 

 source of information. 



I have deemed it advisable not to interfere with the thermo- 

 metric scale, weights, and measures, that are now almost univer- 

 sally adopted on the Continent. Degrees of temperature in this 

 work are always expressed in the centigrade scale, but at page xii, 



* Lehrbuch der physiologischen Chemie. Von Prof. Dr. C. G. Lehmann. 

 Erster Band. Zweite ganzlich neu umgearbeitete Auflage. Leipzig, Verlag von 

 Wilhelm Engelmann. 1850. 



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