SYNTHETIC CHEMISTRY 



to the Norwegians Guldberg and Waage, who had 

 taken up the subject before him, and, among others, 

 to the late Professor Willard Gibbs, of Yale. 



Meanwhile, in this play of the atoms, what dom- 

 inating force presides? The old chemistry had as- 

 similated the varying attractions between different 

 substances to the human passions. The atoms hate 

 and love, seek or reject, their fellows. They, too, 

 have their "affinities." Of this antique idea we 

 catch an echo in Goethe's well-known tale. For 

 M. Berthelot's iconoclastic spirit, the affinities were 

 but princely phantoms like the " vital forces" 

 themselves. The real agent here is heat. With 

 this conception, the new science of thermo-chemis- 

 try was born, and its godfather was the founder of 

 chemical synthesis. 



Not that the close relations of chemism and heat 

 were unknown before his time. Before M. Berthe- 

 lot were Thomsen and Andrews, and Favre and 

 Silbermann, and the Russian chemist Hermann 

 Hess. And long before these a famous memoir 

 from Lavoisier and Laplace. But when, in 1864, 

 M. Berthelot penetrated this new field, the marks 

 of his predecessors were faint and few. His ex- 

 periments, almost unexampled in their number and 

 extent in the whole realm of experimental science, 

 which provided the foundations, and his co-ordinat- 

 ing genius raised the imposing structure of to-day. 



