24 UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI BULLETIN 



among various substances or processes, as mere consequences 

 of purely quantitative differences in the arrangement of a 

 homogeneous substance or in the local intensity of a single 

 kind of process. Perhaps the most signal example of this is 

 to be seen in the series of hypotheses and experimental veri- 

 fications which established first the principle of multiple pro- 

 portions and then the periodic law in chemistry, and thus 

 showed that the qualitatively distinct chemical elements are 

 not irreducible ultimates, but probably manifest simply differ- 

 ences in quantity or ordering of subatomic homogeneous units. 

 When this was followed up by the further and complementary 

 discovery that supposed elemental substances break down into 

 others, within measurable periods of time; and by the at least 

 hypothetical establishment of the magnitudes and electrical, 

 properties of the two types of subatomic units in which this 

 process of reduction apparently reaches its limit: then, the 

 wall of division between chemistry and physics, if not battered 

 down, had at least had conspicuous breaches made in it. In 

 any case, within chemistry a science which at its beginning 

 had been content to take certain irreducible and discontinuous 

 differences between substances as its primary data, a much 

 greater degree of unification had been brought about, and 

 had been brought about by the use of conceptions drawn 

 either from mechanics or from the theory of electricity in 

 other words, by an approach towards typically mechanistic 

 conceptions. 



While chemistry has in this manner been making direct 

 connection on its lower side with sciences of a more funda- 

 mental and more nearly purely quantitative character, it has 

 at the same time been reaching up into the region once re- 

 served for biology. Organic chemistry has learned to fabri- 

 cate in the laboratory most of these compounds once supposed 

 to be the exclusive and inimitable products of the action of 

 "vital forces." What is a good deal more significant, phys- 

 iological processes themselves have proven in a number of 

 cases to be conditioned upon, if not absolutely reducible to, 



