A College Text-Book of Chemistry

Abstract

THIS book is intended to fill a place between the “Introduction to the Study of Chemistry” and the “Inorganic Chemistry” by the same author. The style and plan of the book may be estimated from the author's remark in the preface, where he expresses the opinion that “The time has not yet come for the abandonment of the study of elements and their compounds in what some are pleased to call the old-fashioned way.” Intended, as its name implies, for the use of colleges, the book differs in no essential particulars from other text-books of the same scope. The arrangement adopted for the treatment of the subject is one that has in more recent years repeatedly appeared, a few typical elements and their compounds being studied in some detail in the earlier chapters, and the main bulk of the subject subsequently dealt with from the standpoint of the periodic law. Each descriptive chapter is followed by a number of experiments to be carried out by the student, whose power of observation is aided and developed by the manner in which many suggestive questions are asked concerning each experiment. A number of chapters throughout the book are devoted to a discussion of the principles of theoretical chemistry, and it is in reading these that we are more particularly struck with the loose and inaccurate expressions that are more or less characteristic of the book. Thus it is not the best definition of energy to say that it is “that which causes change in matter.” Again, in discussing chemical changes, the student is told to “consider the changes included under the head of fire.” Is not fire rather a phenomenon accompanying these changes? In discussing the law of conservation of energy the incomplete statement is made that “from a certain amount of heat we can get a certain amount of motion, and that for a certain amount of motion we can get a certain amount of heat.” In the first place this form of statement is likely to give the impression that heat is something entirely different from motion, and in the second place it implies that heat and motion are quantitatively convertible, which is not strictly true. Further on the statement is made that in order to bring about chemical change “high heat must be used to aid the reaction.”

A College Text-Book of Chemistry.

By Ira Remsen. Pp. xx + 689. (London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1901.) Price 8s. 6d. net.