The Tendencies of Chemistry 



granulating, laminating, melting, liquifying, 

 digesting, infusing, macerating/' etc. 



Berthelot has given us a masterly account 1 

 of this long period of gestation, when human 

 thought, so full of life in every other respect, 

 seems, when confronting science, sunk in a 

 dream -broken sleep. We owe him special 

 thanks for having pointed out the paths along 

 which this dust of science may have been trans- 

 mitted from age to age across the civilisations 

 of India, Egypt, Greece and Europe, which form 

 as it were oases in a desert of barbarism. 



The seventeenth century, thanks to the 

 efforts of Galileo, Torricelli, Descartes, Pascal 

 and Newton, saw the birth of mechanics, 

 astronomy and physics. Then came the turn 

 of chemistry; only a collective effort could 

 call it into existence. When in a space of 

 twenty years one sees crowded such names as 

 Priestley, Cavendish, Bergmann, Scheele, Four- 

 croy, Lavoisier, one realises that the world was 

 carried away by an impulse of scientific realism. 



Probably no science ever owed so much 



1 Les Origines de Valchimie^ 1885. Introduction a ? etude de 

 la chimie des anciens et du moyen age, 1889. 



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