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SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXIX. No. 749 



been described and classified, so many- 

 methods have been laid down, so much de- 

 tail confronts the student, and his field of 

 study has been so subdivided as to suggest 

 and foster the delusion that the total sum 

 of chemical knowledge must be vast in- 

 deed. Vast in its detail perhaps it is, but 

 lacking in those fimdamental unities 

 which out of the confusion of detail bring 

 wisdom. Chemistry still awaits its New- 

 ton. It still justifies the estimate of Kant, 

 who said of it more than one hundred 

 years ago: 



Chemistry is a science, but not a science in the 

 highest sense of that word; that is a knowledge 

 of Nature reduced to mathematical mechanics. 



Despite the immense amount of dry de- 

 tail which we have accumulated, and in 

 some measure correlated, chemistry is still 

 in the imaginative era where generaliza- 

 tions are more the result of happy inspira- 

 tion than of close mathematical analysis. 



Chemistry concerns itself with the 

 changes which matter undergoes in its 

 varying relations to certain forms of 

 energy and yet we do not know what 

 matter is nor have we any conception of 

 the real nature of energy. One has only 

 to state in their ultimate terms the prob- 

 lems confronting us to bring a realization 

 of how very far from their solution we 

 still stand. They are, for instance, thus 

 summarized by Karl Pearson: What is it 

 that moves? Why does it move? How 

 does it move? "Where, yet, I ask you is 

 their answer to be found in chemistry? 



"We have built our science upon the as- 

 sumption that matter, whatever that may 

 be, is composed of indivisible atoms, of a 

 comfortable and ultimate simplicity, only 

 to find that the atom is in fact divisible 

 and that its structure is undoubtedly com- 

 plex beyond imagination. As to those 

 phases of energy which fire concerned with 

 chemical change, even so great a philo- 

 sophical chemist as Ostwald says: 



Chemical energy is to us the least known of all 

 the various forms, as we can measure neither it 

 nor any of its factors directly. The only means 

 of obtaining information regarding it is to trans- 

 form it into another species of energy. 



So we have gone on for a hundred and 

 fifty years transforming chemical energy 

 into electrical energy or into heat, making 

 minutely refined measurements of the 

 relatively small amounts of energy appear- 

 ing in our processes, while wholly uncon- 

 scious aU this time of the stupendous stores 

 of potential energy which we now vaguely 

 begin to realize are bound up in matter. 



Our study of matter has led us to teach 

 that it manifests itself in some seventy 

 distinct and separate forms which we call 

 elements, and yet our very definition of an 

 element is a confession of our failure. 

 An element is something which we have 

 not been able to decompose into anything 

 simpler. We have discovered some curious 

 and interesting relationships between the 

 elements which point to their common 

 oi'igin. In his heart each one of us be- 

 lieves that they must have had a common 

 origin and that the cycles of development 

 which they exhibit can only have resulted 

 from the action of a periodic variable upon 

 a constant, and yet we very rarely even 

 consider the question of their genesis or 

 why their properties are what they are. 

 "We are content to regard them as so many 

 distinct creations. The discovery of a 

 new element is hailed as marking an epoch 

 in the history of our science when our real 

 business should be the elimination of the 

 elements as such. 



In their interactions, the elements, as 

 we know them, manifest valences and se- 

 lective affinities which determine the course 

 of all chemical change, and yet we are 

 without an acceptable working hypothesis 

 of the cause and nature of either valence 

 or chemical affinity. Our ideas regardmg 

 the constitution of the molecules of many 



