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V. Researches on Organo-metallic Bodies. — Third Memoir. On a New Series of Organic 
Adds containing Nitrogen. By E. Feankland, Ph.B., F.R.S., Professor of Chemistry 
in Owens College, Manchester. 
Received June 19, — Read June 19, 1856. 
In the progress made by Organic Chemistry during the past fifteen years, no generaliza- 
tion has perhaps contributed so extensively to the development of this branch of the 
science, as the doctrine of substitution. The value of this doctrine becomes even still 
more apparent, when it is remembered that chemists have, until very recently, possessed 
adequate means for following out its suggestions, in one direction only. The peculiar 
habits of chlorine render the substitution of an electro-positive constituent by this element, 
generally a work of little or no difficulty, and even the like substitution of other electro- 
negative for electro-positive elements in organic bodies, presents no insurmountable 
obstacles. But the inverse process has hitherto been successfully accomplished only in 
comparatively few cases, owing to the want of a body capable, like chlorine, of effecting 
such a replacement with facility. This want is now supplied in zincmethyl and its homo- 
logues ; bodies which, on account of their intense affinities and peculiar behaviour, pos- 
sess in an eminent degree the property of removing electro-negative constituents and 
replacing them by methyl, ethyl, &c. The action of zincmethyl upon water, attended as 
it is by the substitution of methyl for oxygen, 
QH3Zn'l^rC,H3,H 
HOJ IZnO, 
may be regarded as the type of these reactions, which open up a most extensive and per- 
fectly new field of research, fi’om the cultivation of which important discoveries cannot 
fail to spring. Amongst the reactions of this nature which promise most interesting 
results, are those -with the chlorine and oxygen substitution products derived from the 
ethers and organic acids, which might lead to the higher members of each homologous 
series being produced from the lower ones, if not to the building up of some of those 
series from theii’ inorganic t}q)es ; a discovery which cannot now remain long in abeyance. 
Instead of immediately pm'suing this line of investigation, however, I determined in the 
first place to confine my attention to the action of these organo-zinc bodies upon inor- 
ganic compounds. 
In a former memoir * I endeavoured to give a general view of the rational constitution 
of all the organo-metalhc bodies then known, by showing that they all possessed a mole- 
cular isonomy with the inorganic compounds of the respective metals. The only com- 
* Philosophical Transactions, 1852, page 438. 
