187?.] 
Notices of Books. 
409 
gical students, but for schoolboys and the general public as well. 
Now, if it is intended for the first-mentioned category of readers, 
it is at once too copious and too meagre, teaching those things 
it ought not to teach, and leaving untaught those things it ought 
to teach ; if for the latter, it is again far too detailed in some 
parts and too superficial in others. The great mistake committed 
by the whole of the five writers connected with the work has 
been in endeavouring to teach too many things at once, the con- 
sequence being that the book is overloaded with instructions in 
the rudiments of chemical science, and descriptions of elements 
and compounds that have nothing to do with Industrial Che- 
mistry. The natural result of this waste of space is that hosts 
of important compounds, whose names have long been house- 
hold words even amongst the general public, are either passed 
over in silence or dismissed in a few lines. Will it be credited 
that — in a work published in the last quarter of the nineteenth 
century, and written “ for manufacturers, &c.” — while page after 
page is devoted to lengthy descriptions of such rarely seen ele- 
ments as tellurium, gallium, yttrium, and a dozen others, half a 
page is given to platinum as an industrial metal, and such every- 
day products as dynamite and carbolic acid are barely mentioned. 
Had the space occupied by so much useless and extraneous 
matter, all of which may be found in any half-crown Manual of 
Chemistry, been devoted to the real object of the work, we might 
possibly have had a few pages given to such minor matters as 
calico-printing, aniline, anthracen and naphthalin dyes, collo- 
dion, Esparto grass, pebble powder, oxalic acid and its salts, 
tannic and pyrogallic acid, picric acid, and other chemical pro- 
ducts which are constantly mentioned in the columns of every 
newspaper. 
The way in which the translation is executed and edited leaves 
much to be desired ; but the portions added to Messrs. Stohmann 
and Engler’s adaptation of Payen’s “Precis,” which are evidently 
from the practised pen of Dr. Paul, form a strong contrast, in 
the ease and completeness with which they are written, to the 
disjointed style of the remainder of the work. The additions, 
in fact, are the best part of the book, which is more than half 
again as large as Stohmann and Engler’s translation. 
The work is ostensibly intended for English use, but in many 
parts too much favour has been shown to foreign processes to 
the entire exclusion of the methods of working usually adopted 
in this country. For instance, although Weldon’s chlorine 
process is fairly described, Spence’s improvements in the manu- 
facture of alum and MaCtear’s method of sulphur recovery are 
entirely ignored. These are only two out of the many English 
processes which have been passed over in silence. 
Another singular defecft, which ought not to exist in a book of 
this sort, is the almost entire absence of references to fuller 
accounts of processes than the space at the editors’ disposal 
