A History of Chemistry from Earliest Times to the Present Day A History of Chemistry

Abstract

PROF. OSTWALD, who has done so much for the historical side of the literature of chemistry, has declared that “there is no more effective means of vivifying and deepening the study of a science than to saturate one's-self in its history.” And perhaps of no science can this be more emphatically said than of chemistry. The story of its rise and development is one of the most astonishing and most deeply interesting chapters in the history of human progress. No one science can show such a splendid succession of material triumphs, or afford a more striking exemplification of the truth and wisdom of Bacon's aphorism that Scientia est potentia. It matters little that the desire to know may have had its origin in the lowest motives of self-interest. No doubt at all times in the history of the world there have been persons curious to know for the mere sake of knowing—persons, indeed, who deliberately preferred the risk of the possible unhappiness of wisdom to the apparently certain bliss of ignorance—but such persons have always been in a vast minority. But in the main the springs of human activity—intellectual no less than physical—have their origin in an enlightened self-interest. However “pure” a science may be to its votaries, there is a good deal of human nature in it after all, and when we come down to ultimate causes it is precisely this aspect of the matter that gives to the history of chemistry its strong human interest, and makes the personal story of its cultivators so fascinating.

A History of Chemistry from Earliest Times to the Present Day.

By Ernst von Meyer. Translated by George McGowan. Third English edition, translated from the third German edition, with various additions and alterations. Pp. xxvii + 691. (London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd.) Price 17s. net.

A History of Chemistry.

By F. P. Armitage. Pp. xx + 266. (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1906.) Price 6s.