THE REVIVAL OF INORGANIC CHEMISTRY. 293 



In the earlier days of chemistry no sharp line was drawn between 

 inorganic and organic substances. It is generally thought that we owe 

 this distinction to Nicholas Lemery, who, in 1675, classified substances 

 according to their origin, as mineral, vegetable, and animal, a distinc- 

 tion which has survived until the present day in popular speech. La- 

 voisier, recognizing in substances of vegetable and animal origin the 

 elements carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen, and led by his 

 researches to attribute a peculiar importance to oxygen, regarded inor- 

 ganic bases and acids as oxides of simple radicals, and organic bodies 

 as oxides of compound radicals composed of carbon, hydrogen, and 

 sometimes nitrogen, but did not otherwise distinguish them. Even in 

 1811 it was undetermined whether carbon compounds obey the laws of 

 constant and multiple proportions, and it was two or three years more 

 before Berzelius, having sufficiently improved the methods of organic 

 analysis, definitely proved that they do, in fact, conform to these laws, 

 but are of greater complexity than the comparatively simple inorganic 

 compounds then known. In his electro- chemical theory, the theory of 

 dualism, developed between 1812 and 1818, Berzelius regarded the 

 simple inorganic bodies, such as the bases and acids, as binary com- 

 pounds of positive with negative atoms, held together by electrical 

 attraction ; the more complex bodies, as the salts, being binary com- 

 pounds of a higher order; the organic compounds, on the contrary, 

 being regarded as ternary or quaternary. Later he extended the 

 dualistic conception to these also, adopting the idea of Lavoisier that 

 they are binary compounds of oxygen with compound radicals, com- 

 posed of carbon, hydrogen, and sometimes nitrogen, a view which he 

 developed further and never wholly abandoned. In 1817 we find Leo- 

 pold Gmelin maintaining that organic compounds are the products of 

 a vital force and can not be produced artificially. This view was enter- 

 tained by Berzelius even as late as 1827, or later. Berzelius attributed 

 the formation of organic compounds, with their relatively weak positive 

 and negative characters, to peculiar electrical conditions existing in 

 the organism. We can not reproduce these conditions in the laboratory, 

 and, therefore, can not produce organic compounds artificially. Those 

 transformations which we are able to effect are always from the more 

 complex to the simpler. We can isolate the intermediate stages in the 

 breaking down of organic matter into carbon dioxide, water and 

 ammonia, — thatis, we can follow the change of matter from the organic 

 to the inorganic, step by step — but we can not reverse the process and 

 build up, nor can we hope to do so in the future. This opinion of Ber- 

 zelius marks the widest gulf between organic and inorganic chemistry, 

 a gulf too wide for human power to bridge. How dangerous it is to 

 set limits to the power of science ! But one year later, in 1828, Wohler 

 announced his discovery that urea, a body of animal origin, could be 

 produced from ammonium cyanate, a substance which, in its turn, can 

 be built up from its constituent elements, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, 



