THE ATOMIC VIEW OF NATURE. 



407 



Organic 



differ, could be approximately brought into line and order. 

 This period was filled by the development of the chem- 

 istry of organic compounds. The chemical substances 

 which make up the framework and numerous tissues chemistry. 

 of all living beings, the juices and products of vegetable, 

 the food and the excreta of animal organisms, consist 

 mostly of a few elementary bodies, combined according 

 to numbers which are highly complex and unintelligible. 

 Most of these compounds, if removed from the organism 

 which contained them, proved to be subject to rapid de- 

 composition. An increasing number of stable compounds, 

 however, were in course of time prepared from these 

 residues, and these formed especially the subject of organic 

 analysis. Already Lavoisier had indicated how some 

 system might be brought into the apparent complexity 

 of these organic bodies ; and this view was adopted by 

 Berzelius and incorporated in his dual or binary system. 1 



1 Kopp's account of the develop- 

 ment of Berzelius's views on organic 

 compounds is most interesting and 

 instructive. As late as 1814 he 

 could not reconcile the composition 

 of organic acids, such as oxalic acid, 

 with the atomic theory ; but re- 

 newed efforts and improved methods 

 of analysis taught him in the fol- 

 lowing years how to apply the 

 atomic formulas to the description 

 of such compounds. " He was 

 the first to show the only right 

 road to inform ourselves regarding 

 the constitution of these bodies, 

 the method, namely, of analysing 

 their combinations with inorganic 

 substances of known atomic weight. 

 ... He had also a great share in 

 establishing the view that the ratios 

 of combination in organic com- 

 pounds are analogous to those 

 of inorganic substances, and that 



theories of the former must begin 

 by comparing them with the lat- 

 ter" (' Geschichte der Chemie,' vol. 

 i. p. 398 ; cf . also ' Die Entwickel- 

 ung der Chemie,' p. 532, &c. ) To 

 Berzelius is thus due more than to 

 any other man the breaking down 

 of the barrier which had before his 

 time divided the chemistry of or- 

 ganic from that of inorganic sub- 

 stances, For a considerable time 

 Berzelius did not look upon organic 

 compounds as binary in fact, in 

 1814 he assumed that the difference 

 between organic and inorganic com- 

 pounds lay in this, that the latter 

 were all binary, whereas the former 

 were ternary or quaternary. The 

 French chemists, under the influ- 

 ence of Lavoisier's oxygen theory, 

 favoured the binary view, and this 

 was much strengthened by Gay- 

 Lussac's researches on cyanogen (in 



