February 2:^,, 1922] 



NATURE 



231 



f 



The Sterilisation of Scientific Inquiry, the Re- 

 dation of Industry and the Stay of Progress in 

 ucation," an Act which penalises all our scientific 

 rkers, the lawyers have been disputing over the 

 Chemical and have practically decided that it 

 no meaning. They have toyed with the doublet 

 •ganic Chemical and their dialectics have landed 

 m in the conclusion that chemists do not in the 

 St know where they are — so they proceed to tell 

 rhere they are not. The decisions read like 

 given in Wonderland, being on strictly 

 Humpty Dumpty " lines; they are akin to his 

 ous reading of " toves" : 



Well, ' toz.rs ' are something like badgers — 

 icy're something like lizards — and they're some- 

 ing like corkscrews." 



Now a wrangle is on over Fine Chemical, a term 



t has never been defined and is indefinable. 



According to the Schedule to the Act, protection 



given to " All synthetic organic chemicals . . . 

 analytical reagents, all other fine chemicals and 

 . hemicals manufactured by fermentation processes." 



The Board of Trade, putting its own interpreta- 

 tion upon these words, has produced a very long list 

 '>f dutiable chemicals; but this is deemed so imper- 

 tect that several hundred applications have been 

 ged to amend it. One of the articles not on the 



t is Calcium Carbide and an inquiry has been held, 

 at intervals lasting over many weeks, into the legiti- 



acy of the claim that this substance is a synthetic 



ganic chemical, to be ranked in the army of the 



otected. 



An advocate learned in the law but without know- 

 edge of chemistry, sitting unassisted by an expert 

 assessor, after hearing many witnesses for and . 

 against, no one of whose testimony, it is obvious, 

 could he well appraise, without attempting to deal 

 with the adjective " synthetic," has pronounced that 

 the carbide is not even an organic chemical. 



Given such a tribunal, the issue is obviously a 

 matter of chance ; chemists would be equally unable 

 to decide with justice in cases into which purely 

 legal considerations entered. Still, the decision is 

 a serious reflection upon the mental attitude of the 

 chemist — upon his failure to think and speak only 

 in precise terms. Unfortunately the " Ignorance 

 of the Learned " — Hazlitt's memorable phrase — is 

 always with us. 



Calcium carbide, as every motorist and most in- 

 telligent people to-day know, gives acetylene as sole 

 gaseous product when water is dropped upon it, the 

 hydrogen of the water being exchanged for the 

 calcium of the acetylide (carbide) and vice versa. 

 The synthesis of acetylene, from carbon and 

 NO. 2730, VOL. 109] 



hydrogen at the temperature of the electric arc, was 

 first effected in 1859 by Berthelot. That the distin- 

 guished French chemist had no doubt of the organic 

 nature of the compound is clear from the fact that 

 he describes the method in his " Chimie Organique 

 fondee sur la Synthese " and also in his " Lemons 

 sur les Methodes generales de Synthese en Chimie 

 Organique " (1864). Practically speaking, it is the 

 fundamental synthesis of organic chemistry, the 

 foundation upon which the vast series of construc- 

 tive processes which render the science so remark- 

 able has been developed. 



If there be one word in use in chemistry which, 

 after long dispute, has a defined and accepted mean- 

 ing, it is the word " organic." The dispute began 

 with Wbhler's discovery, in 1828, that urea — the 

 organic compound which every human being voids 

 daily in considerable quantity — could be made by 

 a purely artificial process : the birth of synthetic 

 organic chemistry is to be dated from that moment ; 

 structural chemistry became possible only after 

 Frankland had introduced the conception of valency 

 (1852). Then system began. The prince of system- 

 atists, Kekule, in 1851, first defined Organic 

 Chemistry as the Chemistry of the Carbon Com- 

 pounds. Others followed him. When Schorlemmer, 

 considerably later, suggested as the better definition 

 — The Chemistry of the Hydrocarbons and their 

 Derivatives — he took care to point out that "com- 

 pounds containing one atom of carbon such as CO2, 

 COCI2, CS2, HCN, which are commonly described 

 in the inorganic part, are as much derivatives of 

 marsh gas, CH4, the most simple hydrocarbon, as 

 methyl alcohol and formic acid." In his "Rise 

 and Development of Organic Chemistry," in dis- 

 cussing a series of organic syntheses, he makes 

 special reference to that of acetylene and imme- 

 diately afterwards remarks: "after this the syn- 

 thesis of organic compounds made rapid progress." 



What does it matter where the chemist may 

 choose to describe a carbon compound, as a matter 

 of convenience and policy, to-day? To put port 

 into a lower instead of into an upper bin does not 

 change the wine to sherry. No legal dialectics can 

 depose a substance from its proper place in the 

 chemist's system. 



In fact, the decision of the Board of Trade 

 Referee is an offence against both chemical tradition 

 and our chemical conscience. Appeals, with refer- 

 ence to chemicals, under the Act, if they are to be 

 heard justly, should be submitted to a tribunal of 

 chemists learned in chemical science, not to an arbi- 

 trator only learned in the law, whose attitude can but 

 be that of " Humpty Dumpty." H. E. A. 



