NATURE 



577 



A CHEMICAL " WRECKER." 



Chemical Lecture Notes. By Peter T. Austen, Ph.D., 

 F.C.S., Professor of General and Applied Chemistry, 

 Rutgers College, and the New Jersey State Scientific 

 School. (New York : John Wiley and Sons, 1888.) 



THE work of a teacher of chemistry is becoming more 

 difficult and more perplexing every day. The mass 

 of facts of primary importance bbth to the science and to 

 technology is now so great that the amount of time that 

 can reasonably be devoted to the business of lecturing 

 during an ordinary College course is wholly inadequate 

 to overtake them. The chemical student of to-day is 

 naturally expected to have a wider range of knowledge, 

 and a far higher standard of acquirement, than his brother 

 of five-and-twenty years ago. The wonder is, that one 

 small head can carry all that he is required to know. 

 One inevitable result of this mass of material is seen in 

 the specialization, both in work and in teaching, which is 

 becoming increasingly apparent. There are chemists to 

 whom the chemistry of the carbon compounds is rapidly 

 becoming a sort of " Dark Continent," and who begin to 

 regard the intricacies of a structural formula with much 

 the same feelings as they would look upon the tangled 

 vegetation of a jungle ; and, on the other hand, there are 

 men to whom the sesquipedalian names of organic che- 

 mistry are as familiar as household words, but who are 

 oblivious to the most ordinary facts of mineral or physical 

 chemistry. Specialism is of course inevitable. The field 

 is far too big to be ranged over by one man if he means 

 to do his fair share of the work of cultivating it. But 

 luestion remains, What to teach, and how to teach 

 The truth is, that as chemistry is too frequently 

 taught to-day, the facts obscure the view of the principles. 

 We pile up the deck-load when we ought to jettison half 

 the cargo. What we want is, a stricter subordination of 

 facts to principles. We need to import the methods of 

 the statistician into our procedure. Could anything be 

 more deadly dull, or intellectually more depressing, than 

 the courses of so-called "advanced chemistry" professed in 

 some of our Colleges, in which the only stimulus to mental 

 exertion on the part of the teacher and the taught comes 

 from the spur of the inevitable examination at the end } 

 Not one teacher in ten seems to recognize that his first 

 duty is to be interesting. His first duty, he will tell you, 

 is to pass his men ; and as our systems of examination 

 are at present ordered, the passing is more a question of 

 the facts than of the principles. And yet no one who 

 has listened to the lectures of such men as Liebig or 

 Hofmann or Victor Meyer can doubt for a moment that 

 the teaching of even the most " advanced " chemistry is 

 capable of affording a high intellectual enjoyment. But 

 then, such men are not the slaves of a Syllabus ; they are 

 not held in bondage in Burlington Gardens. They are 

 free to develop their own methods and to stamp their 

 own individuality on their work. The revolt in the Nine- 

 teenth Century, the other day, might have been more suc- 

 cessful if it had been more judiciously fought. The chemist ' 

 who knows, can afford to smile at Mr. Frederic Harrison's 

 Vol. XXXIX.— No. 1016. 



sneer at the value of the knowledge of the number of the 

 isomeric amyl alcohols. Of course, the bare fact of the 

 number is not of cardinal importance, but it is evi- 

 dently not given to Mr. Harrison to know all that is 

 implied by that fact. In this respect at least, Mr. Harri- 

 son is a degenerate disciple. The Master's knowledge of 

 chemistry was not bounded by the limits of a volume in 

 the " International Scientific Series " : Comte had dabbled 

 sufficiently deep in the science to have appreciated the 

 real worth even of the fact, could he have lived to acquire 

 it. But, although Mr. Harrison may shoot badly, the 

 circumstance that he should have gone to the barricades at 

 all is significant ; and every teacher who has a soul above 

 that of a crammer must share in his growing impatience 

 with the present condition of things. 



Now there is no doubt, if we may judge from his book, 

 that Prof. Austen would also gladly range himself behind 

 the barricade if Mr. Knowles would only enlist him ; but 

 whether his shooting would be of any use, is, as we 

 proceed to show, very questionable. 



Dr. Austen writes, as he tells us, for those students who 

 study, "not merely to pass, but to know." His book is 

 not intended to be a text-book : it is simply a collection 

 of notes and observations on topics which his experience 

 as a teacher has shown " often give the student more or 

 less trouble." No attempt has been made " to include 

 all the rocks and shoals on whi:h the chemical student 

 I may get wrecked." In short, the book is an attempt to 

 I deal with the philosophy of chemistry rather than with 

 I the facts ; and as such it seemed to us, in view of the 

 j ideas to which we have attempted to give utterance at 

 the beginning of this notice, to merit careful examination. 

 We have, first, a short introduction, in the style of 

 certain well-known lectures, " adapted to a juvenile au- 

 ditory," which we associate with the classic shades of 

 Albemarle Street. Dr. Austen's sentiments concerning 

 the functions and duties of a teacher are admirable, but 

 they have just as much originality as his attempts to 

 write in the manner of Dr. Tyndall. The introductory 

 paragraphs are, indeed, characteristic of the rest of the 

 book. We have much loose statement, and many faults 

 of expression and of taste, with, now and again, a shrewd 

 practical remark, which Mr. Harrison's clever young 

 examinee, with the " marvellous flair" would certainly 

 "spot," like the vulture he is said to resemble. But 

 there is not a single original observation in the work, nor 

 a single new experiment. The iron-filings and the sul- 

 phur do their time-honoured duty in illustrating the 

 nature of chemical change, and Hofmann's well-known 

 examples of the volumetric relations of the simple and 

 compound gases are duly set forth, but with nothing of 

 the verve of that great expositor. We admit that it is 

 difficult to find anything better in illustration of these 

 particular points ; but then, what is the raison d'etre of 

 Dr. Austen's book.? In dealing with such matters as 

 Molecules and Atoms, Valency and Atomicity, Dr. Austen 

 is clearly out of his depth, or rather he is a sufficiently 

 good swimmer to get over the surface indifferently well — 

 but with neither the skill nor the hardihood to get down to 

 the pearls below. He is befogged by the smoke-rings, 

 and muddled among the vortex-atoms. At times he 

 seeks to be interesting, but with what success the following 

 extracts may serve to show. 



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