52 BEITISH ASSOCIATION FOE THE ADVANCEMENT OE SCIENCE. 



nomena, find ourselves in the condition of the explorer of a new continent, who, 

 although he might see the same sun over his head, the same ocean rolling at his 

 feet, the same geological structure in the rocks that were piled around him, and 

 was thus assured that he still continued a denizen of his own planet, and subject 

 to those physical laws to which he had been before amenable, yet at every step 

 he took was met by some novel object, and startled with some strange and porten- 

 tous production of Nature's fecundity. Even so the chemist of the present day, 

 whilst he recognizes in the world of organic life the same general laws which pre- 

 vail throughout the mineral kingdom, is nevertheless astonished and perplexed by 

 the multiplicity of new bodies that present themselves, the wondrous changes in 

 them resulting from slight differences in molecular arrangement, and the simple 

 nature of the machinery by which such complicated effects are brought about. 

 And as the New World might never have been discovered, or, at all events, would 

 not have been brought under our subjection, without those improvements in naval 

 architecture which had taken place prior to the age of Columbus, so the secrets of 

 organic chemistry would have long remained unelicited, but for the facilities in the 

 methods of analysis which were introduced by Liebig. Before his time the deter- 

 mination of the component elements of an organic substance was a task of so much 

 skill as well as labour, that only the most accomplished analysts — such men, for 

 instance, as my lamented friend Dr. Prout in this country, or as the great Berze- 

 iius in Sweden — could be depended upon for such a work; and hence the data 

 upon which we could rely for deducing any general conclusions went on accumu- 

 lating with extreme slowness. But the new methods of analysis invented by Lie- 

 big have so simplified and so faciliated the processes, that a student, after a few 

 months' practical instruction in a laboratory, can, in many instances, arrive at re- 

 sults sufficiently precise to be made the basis of calculation, and thus to enable the 

 master mind, which is capable of availing itself of the facts before it, to breathe 

 life into these dry numerical details, — just as the sculptor, by a few finishing stokes, 

 brings out the expression of the statue, which has been prepared for him by 

 the laborious chiselling of a number of subordinate workmen. And as the establish- 

 ed laws and institutions of the Old World have been modified — may I not say in 

 some instances rectified? — by the insensible influence of those of the New, so have 

 the principles that had been deduced from the phenomena of the mineral kingdom 

 undergone in many instances a correction from the new discoveries made in the che- 

 mistry of the animal and vegetable creation. It was a great step indeed in the pro- 

 gress of the science, when Lavoisier set the example of an appeal to the balance 

 in all our experimental researches, and the Atomic Theory of Dalton may be regard- 

 ed as the necessary, although somewhat tardy, result of the greater numerical pre- 

 cision thus introduced. But no less important was the advance achieved, when 

 structure and polarity were recognized as influencing the condition of matter; and 

 when the nature of a body was felt to be determined, not only by the condition of 

 its component elements, but also by their mutual arrangement and collocation — a 

 principle which, first illustrated amongst the products of organic life, has since been 

 found to extend alike to all chemical substances whatever. 



Formerly it had been the rule to set down the bodies which form the constituents 

 of the substances we analyzed, and which had never yet under our hands under- 

 gone decomposition, as elementary ; but the discovery of cyanogen in the first in- 

 stance, and the recognition of several other compound radicals in organic chemis- 

 try more lately, naturally suggest the idea that many of the so-called elements of 



