The Evolution of the Sciences 



sees defiling before his eyes a series of colourless, 

 tasteless and more or less liquifiable gases, and 

 bodies which colour differently litmus paper. 



We need not be surprised if students do not 

 enjoy eagerly a teaching so exclusively de- 

 scriptive, a mere long and monotonous review 

 of elements and compounds. But official 

 programmes and classical books at least show us, 

 magnified to deformity, the essential character 

 of classical chemistry; this science aims princi- 

 pally at being a description of chemical species, 

 a study of the forms of equilibrium of matter 

 at ordinary temperatures. This is so entirely 

 true that one of the works most justly valued 

 by chemists, that of Wiirtz, assumed as a 

 matter of course the form of a dictionary; a 

 sufficiently reasonable arrangement for a science 

 composed of monographs, but whose application 

 to mathematical analysis, mechanics or physics 

 could hardly be conceived. 



We must not permit the endless profusion 

 of monographs to surprise or to irritate us. It 

 was necessary for chemistry to follow this course 

 at the outset, and to draw up the inventory of 



the domain within which it had to evolve. 



26 



