LEAD. BERZELIUS. 83 



that what seems perfect and finely finished to the naked eye, 

 need only be looked at through a magnifier and it will appear 

 to be rough and coarse. 



The edge of a razor is very fine but under a microscope 

 it looks like a worn out saw. 



Berzelius unwittingly magnified his errors and then felt 

 like counting out some of them. 



The great chemist was a good calculator, and liked to 

 obtain six or seven digits in his final result. Possibly he 

 used " seven place logarithms." See pp. 44-45. 



The great chemist was not of a mathematical turn of 

 mind not any more than his very noted re-calculators. 



But while he was unable to stop at the right time at the 

 proper place in the string of decimals, he knew all about the 

 chemical work. 



While he was as reckless in carrying the calculation of 

 additional decimals beyond the limit of his own chemical 

 determination as any of the modern chemists, the re-calcu- 

 lators included, his fine chemical sense, if we so may call it, 

 did not permit him to introduce wilfully corrections less in 

 amount than the uncertainty of his real chemical work. 



It was, I believe, in reference to this investigation that 

 Berzelius made the statement about the chemists who 

 strained at a gnat while swallowing camels. (Sebelien, p. 

 45; Matthew XXIII, 24). 



Sebelien (p. 45) positively asserts, that Berzelius never 

 reduced his weighings to vacuum, because u he had found 

 t{ that the single determinations deviated to a much greater 

 ** extent than the amount of such correction." 



This is just so to-day; but we like to pretend to be exact, 

 we create the show of a high degree of accuracy and do not, 

 all of us, realize how far we modern chemists with balances 

 permitting us to " oscillate " to the hundredth or less of a 

 milligramme are away off in the woods. 



I trust that this little book will make chemists again go to 

 the Grand Old Swede to learn how to work to the advantage 

 of truth. 



