October 8, 1909] 



SCIENCE 



469 



dent's course, and, in its advanced phases, 

 must do so still. But there has come to be 

 an increasing need on the part of students 

 for this division of chemistry as a prere- 

 quisite for certain professional and sci- 

 entific courses to follow; this has made it 

 almost a necessity to insert organic chem- 

 istry immediately after the elementary 

 course. 



This juxtaposition has made the teach- 

 ing of elementary oi'ganic chemistry a 

 more difficult problem than it was, and has 

 placed the teacher of this subject in a some- 

 what unfortunate and unenviable position. 

 Those of you who have taught this subject 

 are very well aware that the student is in 

 the habit of approaching the course in or- 

 ganic chemistry with misgivings ; it is pro- 

 verbially a hard task, and is tabooed as 

 "no snap." It seems to me that organic 

 chemists have themselves to blame for this 

 attitude. Let me cite one or two instances 

 which may serve to justify this claim. 



In the first place, the methods which 

 were in vogue at a time when organic 

 chemistry formed a more advanced part 

 of the college curriculum have not been 

 modified sufficiently to adapt it to the stu- 

 dent at an earlier stage in his career in 

 chemistry. As an illustration of this kind 

 of fault, let me mention the universal prac- 

 tise of prefacing the systematic study of 

 the various classes of organic compounds 

 by a verj' detailed description of the 

 quantitative methods of organic analysis. 

 Instead of this, a brief statement of the 

 essential principles would suffice. Except 

 in a general way, these longer directions, 

 still in use, are rarely comprehended by a 

 student who has not taken quantitative 

 analysis, and at the very beginning, they 

 tend to create discouragement and discon- 

 tent which could be dispensed with by ap- 

 plying a little sound pedagogy. Such 

 remnants of earlier times and methods 



have no more justification at this stage than 

 a minute description of every precaution 

 necessary in the quantitative estimation of 

 manganese would have as an introduction 

 to a discussion of the compounds of man- 

 ganese in a course of general inorganic 

 chemistry. Numerous instances of this 

 atavism are to be found in the elementary 

 text-books of organic chemistry; there is 

 little reason to doubt that they occur in 

 the lectures as well. 



A second and graver difficulty lies in 

 the fact that there has come to be a widen- 

 ing gap between the methods employed in 

 approaching the subject matter of general 

 inorganic chemistry and the methods which 

 we must believe are still not far from uni- 

 versal in attacking the problems of organic 

 chemistry in an elementary course. Thanks 

 to the timely warning of physical chemis- 

 try, and the practical example furnished 

 by a few text-books of general inorganic 

 chemistry, we have made a grand stampede 

 to return once more to the facts of our 

 experience as a basis of procedure. We 

 have endeavored here to strip off much of 

 the speculative husk which has encased the 

 subject with almost impenetrable firmness. 

 In this desirable simplicity, we are content 

 to call a stone, a stone, and to name a 

 flower, a flower. In the teaching of inor- 

 ganic chemistry, this movement has de- 

 manded the wholesale striking out of in- 

 tricately constructed graphic formulae 

 which had no serious or certain justifica- 

 tion in facts, and therefore explained noth- 

 ing. As a result, the other extreme has 

 now been reached, and scarcely any of the 

 reactions and relations considered in an 

 elementary course of inorganic chemistry 

 are presented to the student in this sym- 

 bolic garb. 



On the other hand, the organic chemist, 

 up to the present time, has had little or no 

 success in presenting his subject from an 



