NEW CONCEPTIONS IN SCIENCE 



When Berthelot began his work, chemists de- 

 spaired of ever unravelling such a tangle. Here 

 was a mystery; it needed a name, and the phrase 

 "vital forces" cloaked handsomely their ignorance. 

 Berzelius, the great Swedish chemist, who dominat- 

 ed the science in the first half of the century, saw 

 in his art only an art of destruction. To rebuild 

 was a chimera. "Even," he wrote, "if we should 

 succeed in producing, with inorganic bodies, sub- 

 stances of a composition similar to those of or- 

 ganic products, this mere imitation would give us 

 no hope that we could ever produce the actual 

 things themselves, as we succeed, in the most of 

 cases, in confirming the analysis of the mineral 

 bodies in effecting their synthesis in turn." 



Even Gerhardt, the reformer of chemistry, a 

 thinker and a genius, grew dogmatic here. With 

 a taste for good phrases, he declared that "the 

 chemist does precisely the opposite of living nature ; 

 he burns, destroys, operates by analysis, while the 

 vital force alone may synthesize; it rebuilds the 

 edifice that the chemical forces have torn down." 



All this was in the face of the fact that two or 

 three very notable syntheses of organic bodies had 

 already been made. A quarter of a century had 

 gone since Wohler had produced artificial urea, and 

 it is worthy of note that both he and his fellow- 

 worker Liebig understood fully the import of his 



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