6 WILLIAM M. HAMLET. 



Workers in Chemistry have not been idle during the past year, 

 as may be seen from the list enumerated above, there having been 

 five papers in this subject, two of which are of special interest ; I 

 refer to Nos. 6 and 14, by Mr. R. T. Baker, and Henry G. Smith, 

 Curator and Assistant-Curator respectively of the Technological 

 Museum of Sydney. The oils from some half dozen new species 

 of Eucalypts have been chemically investigated by Mr. Smith, who 

 has been successful in obtaining from these oils some important 

 constituents. He has also contributed to this Society a paper on 

 the chemistry of the camphor of Eucalyptus oil (eudesmol). The 

 discovery that the little shrub found on the sand hills around Port 

 Jackson ( Darwinia fascicularis), yielded an oil consisting largely 

 of geranyl acetate was also made. The presence of the important 

 alcohol, geraniol, in this shrub in fairly large amount promises a 

 great commercial future for this species. 



Of the work and discovery published in Europe, many things 

 of purely theoretical interest have been announced, chief among 

 these items I would mention the solidification of hydrogen, the 

 sterilisation of water on the large scale, the discovery of a sub- 

 stitute for india-rubber, which has been named ' velvril,' and the 

 extension of the researches on nitrification by Winogradsky and 

 Omeliansky. 



The marked feature of modern chemistry is its broad compre- 

 hensiveness, embracing as it does so many separate divisions in the 

 affairs of life, the concentration of attention necessary in any one 

 branch of chemical research being such as to demand all the 

 available energy on the part of the individual ; hence in these 

 times no single individual can presume to anything like a profound 

 knowledge of the great science or even follow it in its many rami- 

 fications. I therefore affirm that it does not come within the 

 grasp of any one man to master the vast accumulation of facts 

 now forming the science of chemistry, and the far-reaching appli- 

 cations and multifarous adaptations of the science. On this account 

 specialism is yearly becoming more pronounced, and the old dual 

 divisions of the science into Organic and Inorganic, become 



