NEW CONCEPTIONS IN SCIENCE 



chemistry enumerates and defines fifty thousand 

 distinct compounds. The most of these are known 

 to the laboratory alone. But even this is but a 

 beginning. Setting out from the fifteen or twenty 

 of the elementary fats found in nature, to take 

 but one example, it would be possible to create 

 from these some millions of others, of which the 

 principal properties might be announced in ad- 

 vance. 



M. Berthelot's work was the beginning of a new 

 form of industry. Already it has destroyed several 

 profitable occupations for instance, the raising of 

 madder-root and indigo for dyes, now replaced by 

 others cheaper and more brilliant by far. Already, 

 following in the French chemist's track, Fischer, of 

 Berlin, has realized the synthesis of all the sugars, 

 and, if his processes are not yet commercial, the 

 time does not seem distant when artificial sugar 

 will compete in the market with that fabricated 

 with the sunlight and the soil. Under the same 

 impulsion, too, has come the manufacture of a 

 variety of new anaesthetics and anodynes. From 

 the same coal-tar which supplies the brilliant new 

 dyes, come also phenacetine, antipyrine, and a long 

 line of other stops for wearied nerves. 



The Organic Chemistry Founded on Synthesis ap- 

 peared in 1860. The Origin of Species came a year 

 before; Pasteur's work on the microbes, Claude 



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