154 



SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT. 



istry, the consideration of chemical as related to other 

 physical forces, such as gravitation, heat, or electricity, 

 though it very greatly occupied the pioneers of chemical 

 science in the early years of the century, — notably 

 Berthollet and Gay-Lussac in France, Dalton and Davy 

 in England, Berzelius in Sweden, — fell gradually into 

 popular disfavour; so much so that even Faraday's 

 electrolytic law had hardly any influence on the de- 

 velopment of chemistry.-^ This one-sided direction of 

 chemical reasoning and observation was still further 

 promoted by the great practical and technical results 

 which followed from the atomic conception, the ease 

 with which processes worked out in the laboratory 

 could be imitated on a large scale in the factory and 

 the workshop. It was the increased power over matter 

 and its manifold transformations which followed im- 

 mediately in the wake of atomic chemistry that 

 gave it its interest, notably when through the study 

 of the carbon compounds — incorrectly termed organic 

 chemistry — new industries of undreamt-of magnitude 

 and importance were created, and when through chemical 

 knowledge the older methods of metallurgy were rapidly 

 superseded. To the popular mind the result is always 

 more interesting than the process of research or of 

 reasoning which leads up to it ; the possession of the 

 product than the knowledge of the procedure. The 



viz., energy. That the correct idea 

 contained in the phlogistic concep- 

 tion was not at once given up, but 

 only gradually lost sight of, is seen 

 from the fact that Lavoisier's first 

 table of elements contained 'caloric ' 

 as one of the simple bodies. See 



Kopp, ' Entvrickelung der Chemie,' 

 p. 209. 



^ On the causes of this see Helm- 

 holtz's Faraday Lecture (' Wissen- 

 schaftliche Abhandlungen,' vol. iii.) 

 and Ostwald, ' Allgemeine Chemie,' 

 2nd ed., vol. ii. part 1, p. 530. 



