Chimica Agraria, Campestre e Silvano

Abstract

THIS book, the work of the well-known professor of agricultural chemistry in the College at Portici, was originally projected as a treatise on agricultural chemistry, to be followed by other volumes dealing with fermentation and animal chemistry. Written, as the author tells us, with many interruptions, between 1884 and the current year, it remains but a fragment of the original scheme, for it deals only with the relations of the plant to water and to solar light and heat-questions, indeed, of fundamental importance to the agriculture of a semi-arid country like Italy. With nearly 900 pages devoted to so small a section of the subject, it will easily be imagined how vast is the scale upon which the work was planned, and this arouses a question which struck us repeatedly during the perusal of the book. Given a treatise on a technical branch of science, like agricultural chemistry, how far should the author deem it his duty to enter into a complete discussion of whatever branch of the pure science he may require to use for the explanation of some technical problem? For example, we have in the book before us some ten pages, 628-638, given up to an acconnt of the nature of exothermic and endothermic chemical reactions. Now, though it is impossible to understand the problems presented by carbon assimilation under the action of light without possessing the conception of the transfer of energy accompanying a reaction and the reversibility of the change, we hold that the reader of a book like the present will have either reached already the required knowledge of pure chemistry or else must be introduced to the new idea in a much less academic fashion. In the main, a book of this type is written for the expert and should stick very close to its text, taking something more than the elements of the pure sciences for granted.

Chimica Agraria, Campestre e Silvano.

Di Italo Giglioli. Pp. xviii + 877; with 31 figures in the text. (Naples: Marghieri, 1902.)