THE TECHNOLOGIST. [August 1, 1864. 



12 ON THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES WHICH FORM 



simpler ingredients, perhaps into their veritable elements, is a legitimate 

 source of pride ; hut in relation, at least, to the arts of life, a greater 

 ground of exultation is, that it can unite those elements or ingredients 

 so as not only to reproduce the compound from which they were taken, 

 but to bring into being, for the first time, compounds new to man. No 

 wonder, then, that Nature is jealous of her chemical secrets. She knows 

 that we shall never try to rival her in lighting up suns and stars, in 

 building granite mountains and digging volcanic craters, or in shaping 

 blades of grass, and manufacturing from it fleeces of wool. For the 

 making of these she has the patent which we cannot infringe. But from 

 the moment that chalk was proved to consist of carbonic acid and lime, 

 the patent for making it expired ; and we can not only produce chalk 

 at will, out of its components, carbonic acid and lime, but out of their 

 elements, carbon, oxygen, and calcium, we can make novel compounds, 

 and forestal Nature in her own market. 



The chemist is thus pre-eminently a transformer, a transmuter, a 

 maker ; in one word, a creator, to the full extent a mortal can be. God 

 has given him one world ; and, in addition, has permitted him "to make 

 as many worlds from it as he can. And every day he is making a new, 

 and still a newer globe, new metals, new earths, new alkalies, new acids, 

 new foods, new drinks, new airs to breathe. Alexander the Great wept 

 because he had not another world to conquer ; but no chemist needs 

 weep on that account, for he may be first creator, and then conqueror of 

 world upon world. Since the century began, Davy gave us one new 

 world ; Berzelius gave us another ; Liebig a third : many more are in 

 store for us. 



The ancient Chemistry, a mute priestess, has long confessed that her 

 oracles are dumb, and herself listens to the revelations of her unreseni- 

 bling successor. Modern chemistry is an active, full-voiced workman, 

 a daimonic blacksmith, like the Scandinavian Thor or the classical 

 Vulcan ; only I do not know that it is essential to our conception of 

 pei-sonified chemistry that he should be represented lame. This black- 

 smith's chief tools are two hammers. The one of them he calls analysis ; 

 it is a crushing hammer. If you bring him anything, no matter how 

 rare and costly, he begs you to lay it on his anvil and let him try it 

 with his tool. There are not many things in the world that can bear 

 uninjured its stroke. The few that can, he sets great store upon, puts 

 aside with a certain reverence, calls elements, and distinguishes by 

 names. Some sixty such elements are all that he has yet encountered ; 

 and, with an improved hammer, he hopes to break down many of these. 

 The multitude of bodies that give way before his blows he continues to 

 smite till they will break no smaller, and the grains that remain he 

 separates according to their kinds, and puts into that parcel of the sixty 

 invincibles to which each belongs. 



His other hammer he calls synthesis ; it is a forging hammer. Be- 

 neath its strokes any two or more of the sixty unbroken residues of bis 



