286 
EDITORIAL. 
amiable and accomplished author will earn the lasting gratitude of every 
student and lover of chemistry. 
" On surveying the preceding portions of this great chemical treasury, 
Baron Liebig was induced to address the publisher in the following eulo- 
gistic and well merited language : 'The industry, the conscientiousness, the 
carefulness and patience of the author excite the utmost astonishment. I 
do not believe that any other nation can exhibit a work which can be placed 
on a par with Gmelin's, or a man who combines such a vast compass of 
knowledge with the spirit and power to execute so colossal a labor/ " 
The great size of the work prevented the publishers from taking hold of 
it, and, in presenting it to the English chemical reader, the Cavendish So- 
ciety has conferred a valuable benefit. 
Physiological Chemistry. By Prof. C. G. Lehmann. Vol. I. Translated 
from the 2d edition by George E. Day, M. D., F. R. S. London, 1851. 
Printed for the Cavendish Society, 1848-9 50-51. 
This volume is the first of the publications issued by the Cavendish So- 
ciety for the year 1851. The author has long been favorably known as a 
physiological chemist, and his book ranks high among the chemical litera- 
ture of Germany. The translation of Dr. Day is made from the recent 
German edition. The work begins with a methodological introduction, 
wherein the present condition of physiological chemistry and the systems 
of its cultivators are discussed. The author, in entering upon his subject, 
endeavors to point out some of the numerous errors into which the most 
zealous elucidators of the chemistry of physiology have been led, which 
appear to him to have diverged in three directions : 
" In the first place, too little attention has been directed to the laws of a 
true natural philosophy, whose simplest rules have in many cases been 
wholly disregarded ; in the next place, the necessary casual connection ex- 
isting between chemistry and physiology, as well as between histology and 
pathological anatomy, has too often been entirely neglected ) and lastly, 
much misconception has aiisen fiomthe assumption that chemistry afforded 
a satisfactory solution to many quesiions which it is either -wholly incom- 
petent to answer, or which must, at all events, remain undecided in the pre- 
sent state of our knowledge," page 2. 
Acknowledging that the use of hypotheses are indispensable in the pro- 
secution of physical inquiries, he censures the custom too often exhibited 
of seizing on a few facts as the basis of a theory of the merest fiction, 
and says : 
" Physiological chemistry has given rise to many delusions of this nature, 
owing to its imper/eet development and to the necessity presented by physi- 
ology and pathology for chemical elucidation. Some few isolated deductions 
were drawn from superfic al chemical experiments, and arranged in a purely 
imaginary connection by the aid of chemical symbols and formulae, for 
whose establishment analysis in many cases did not even afford any sane- 
