The Tendencies of Chemistry 



Natural history commenced in the same manner, 

 and the work of Buffon and Linnaeus was not 

 useless, though it may to-day appear very tedious 

 to us. We consider, at present, that the essential 

 interest of these sciences is the study of life 

 in action that is to say, vegetable and animal 

 biology. The same reasons lead us to say that 

 classical chemistry, while confining itself to 

 nomenclature and to the study of forms, deliber- 

 ately neglected the fundamental problem that 

 is to say, the study of reactions. In a reaction 

 it merely recognised a period of disturbance 

 which had to elapse before a new state of 

 equilibrium could arise, and it hurried over 

 these periods as some historians with a mania 

 for order are wont to do with the story of 

 revolutions. 



When, for example, in the formula 



Zn + H 2 SO 4 =ZnSO 4 +H 2 



it summed up the action of sulphuric acid on 

 zinc, the investigation centred its entire atten- 

 tion on the state of the bodies before and after 

 the reaction; it told us all about their pro- 

 perties and about the quantities involved, and 



then with the brief sign = closed the discussion. 



27 



