970 Organic Compounds in their Relations to Life. [December, 



of the last and highest of these products of Nature's alembic — 

 the Organic Compounds. 



These substances, as they exist on the globe, are for the most 

 part products of organization, and they were long supposed to 

 possess such subtile properties and composition as to be ever 

 necessarily inscrutable to man. But quantitative chemistry has, 

 within the last half century, not only succeeded in the complete 

 analysis of all such substances obtained from organized beings, 

 but it has also effected the synthesis, or reproduction out of their 

 inorganic elements, of thousands of them. Thus W6hler, Berthe- 

 lot, Kolbe, Friedel, Piria, Wertheim, and others have accom- 

 plished the manufacture of such bodies as urea, formic, oxalic, 

 lactic, and salicylic acid, numerous alcohols and ethers, glycer- 

 ine, and a host of essences, including wintergreen, vanilla, mus- 

 tard, cinnamon, camphor, etc.. as well as alizarine and indigo 

 dyes. These facts are sufficient to obliterate completely the line 

 of demarkation formerly supposed to exist between the chemical 

 constitution of inorganic and organic compounds, and when it is 

 remembered that the latter differ as widely from one another as 

 they do from the former in complexity, the uniform process of 

 molecular aggregation cannot be regarded as interrupted at this 

 stage. There is also much indirect evidence, though amounting 

 to proof in but few cases, that the organic compounds, at least 

 some of them, are sometimes directly formed by nature out of 

 their inorganic constituents without the intervention of organized 

 bodies. 



These substances have their peculiar properties depending, like 

 those of all other substances, on their molecular constitution ; the 

 artificial glycerine possesses the same sweet taste as the natural 

 product, the manufaclured spices yield the same aromas, and the 

 laboratory dyes the same colors as those of the Orient. Many 

 organic compounds are exceedingly complex, their molecules 

 being relatively large, containing several thousand times as much 

 matter as a molecule of hydrogen. Their instability, moreover, 

 bears some proportion to their complexity. Most of them are 

 colloidal in structure and refuse to crystallize; a kw of the sim- 

 pler ones, however, in which the proportion of oxygen is large, 

 as sugar, for example, become crystalline under certain conditions. 



The only element which is never absent from any of these com- 

 pounds is carbon. Oxygen is almost universally present, and the 



