Triumphs and Wonders of Modern Chemistry A Popular Treatise on Modern Chemistry and its Marvels, Written in Non-Technical Language for General Readers and Students

Abstract

THE author of this book has sought to make chemistry attractive to readers untrained in the methods of science, by offering them an account of some of the most surprising achievements of modern practical chemistry, and of the most startling deductions from recent chemical and physical speculations. These two subjects alternate throughout the book, but their treatment is of unequal value. Such practical matters as the liquefaction of air, the preparation of oxygen, and the artificial production of nitrogen compounds, are described in an interesting manner, and in an easy and popular style. The wisdom of the plan adopted in dealing with theoretical points is more questionable. The reader is presented, almost on every other page, with numbers intended to impress by their vastness. Such statements as that “in such an inconceivably short interval of time as the millionth part of the millionth part of a second there occur no less than 2,800,000,000,000,000,000 collisions between the little atomic worlds which make up a [candle] flame!” “ abound in every chapter, and the latest hypotheses concerning electrons and the aether are utilised freely to supply similar data. The exclamatory style of these portions, and the excessive attention given to the sensational and the marvellous, render mucli of the book fatiguing to the reader, and injure its value as a means of instruction, especially as no clear distinction is made between those wonders which are facts of experience and the most hazardous guesses as to the structure of the universe.

Triumphs and Wonders of Modern Chemistry. A Popular Treatise on Modern Chemistry and its Marvels, Written in Non-Technical Language for General Readers and Students.

By Dr. G. Martin. Pp. xx + 358. (London: Sampson Low, Marston, and Co., Ltd., 1911.) Price 7s. 6d. net.