Chemical Crystallography

Abstract

PROF. VICTOR GOLDSCHMIDT used to say that, over the door of his laboratory in Heidelberg, he would like to have written “Die Kristallographie ist die Königin des Wissenschaften”; and while he said this chiefly because he personally was fascinated by the external shapes of crystals and their formal geometry, he may perhaps also have thought of crystallography as holding a distinctive place among the sciences, at once isolated and yet pervading. Indeed, crystallography as we know it to-day is in many ways a curious subject. It has come to be principally concerned with the use of X-ray diffraction effects to study, to varying degrees of precision, the arrangement of the atoms in substances, many of which can scarcely be called crystalline at all. The techniques employed belong largely to mathematics and physics, and the information derived is of fundamental importance to subjects so far apart as metallurgy and biology, and particularly to chemistry. There seems, perhaps, something unsatisfactory in the way we cling to so precise a term as ‘crystallography’ to cover all these developments. Yet, as the combined international body of ‘crystaJlographers’ discovered in recent discussions, it is difficult to find any other term to which we can give all the meanings we associate now with the word ‘crystallography’.

Chemical Crystallography An Introduction to Optical and X-ray Methods.

By C. W. Bunn. Pp. xii + 422 + 13 plates. (Oxford: Clarendon Press; London: Oxford University Press, 1945.) 25s. net.