B.—CHEMISTRY. 31 
in biological science, whilst some of them are even found useful by 
journalists in search of sensation. On the other hand, there is little 
public curiosity in regard to the advance of chemical science. A few of 
its applications, and those mainly concerned with warfare, attract 
attention from time to time, although the progress of agricultural chemistry, 
the most important of all from a national point of view, is shamefully 
neglected, in spite of the admirable work which is being done at Roth- 
amsted and elsewhere. The public interest in chemistry does not extend 
far beyond poison gases and dyes. The progress of pure chemistry and 
the development of chemical theory are only followed by a small body of 
specialists, engaged in teaching or research, and of students whom our 
present system of scholarships and degrees forces more and more to 
become specialists, even at a very early stage of their studies. Perhaps 
this state of things is responsible for a certain attitude concerning the 
future of chemistry which may be traced, in implication rather than 
expression, in the work of some chemists at the present day. It appears 
to be thought that chemistry is fated to become a branch of physics, 
and thus to lose its own peculiar discipline, leaving its long-established 
methods to chemists engaged in operations of a routine character, whilst 
new knowledge is being acquired by the application of physical methods 
of experiment, and interpreted by the methods of mathematical physics. 
The knowledge of the internal structure of the atom, and consequently 
of the manner in which atoms may unite chemically with one another, 
has advanced with such extraordinary rapidity that it has seemed that 
chemical facts must henceforth be regarded in an entirely new light. If 
we accept the view, for which such strong evidence has been produced, 
that protons and electrons are the units of which all atoms are composed, 
the forces between them being purely electrical, and that the whole 
system of the chemical elements may be built up in a perfectly regular 
and systematic fashion from these units, whilst the structure of each atom 
enables us to predict how it will enter into combination with other atoms, 
then it would seem that chemistry should in course of time become a 
purely deductive science, the properties of compounds being deduced from 
the number and arrangement of their component atoms, due note being 
taken of the changes of energy during their formation, such changes of 
energy being themselves accounted for by the exchange of electrons. 
Such a conception of chemistry recalls the views which were held some 
fifty years ago as to the mechanical structure of the universe. Kirchoff 
spoke of the aim of natural science as: being ‘the reduction of all the 
jhenomena of nature to mechanics,’ and Helmholtz declared that ‘ the 
bject of the natural sciences is to find the motions upon which all other 
changes are based, and their corresponding motive forces—to resolve 
themselves, therefore, into mechanics.’ Writers of the time made it 
clear that the biological sciences were included in this generalisation. So 
implified a view has lost ground in the course of the last half-century, 
nd although the theoretical possibility of such a conception of science 
would probably find many defenders, it has been generally admitted that 
jhe unity of science is not best shown by attempts to reduce all its 
phenomena to those of a single kind. The acceptance of the modern 
iew as to the structure of the atom has brought about something like a 
return to the position of the mechanical physicists of the nineteenth 
—_—," 
