Chimène

“ Chemistry is in this view mysterious and spinosistically sublime—that it is the science of the latent in all things, of all things as lurking in all. Within the lifeless flint, within the silent pyrites, slumbers an agony of potential combustion. Iron is imprisoned in blood. ”

“ The chemist might go on continually manufacturing hydrogen and oxygen, carbon dioxide, ammonia. But he was never to hope to make alcohol, sugar, urea, any of the multitudinous substances called organic. And now all this folly of forbidding is at an end. The organic bodies are manufactured by man. The inorganic and the organic are no more regarded as clearly distinguishable. Even the chemistry books by their very titles recognise and proclaim this fact. We have no longer works on organic chemistry. We have volumes on the chemistry of carbon compounds. ”

“ The fundamental distinction supposed to be at the basis of all chemical study, that between elements and compounds, is found to be inapplicable when we study such bodies as cyanogen, a compound of the two elements carbon and nitrogen, that behaves like an element. ”

“ This is only a simple case; but the chemical laws which govern it hold equally well for every known substance found in nature. There are only about seventy-five known elements, and of these less than thirty compose the majority of the things found in every-day life. ”

“ Chemistry divides creation into two distinct parts,—organic nature, and inorganic nature. Organic nature, comprising as it does all animal and vegetable creations which show an organization more or less perfect,—or, to be more exact, a greater or lesser motive power, which gives more or less sensibility,—is, undoubtedly, the more important part of our earth. Now, analysis has reduced all the products of this nature to four simple substances, namely: three gases, nitrogen, hydrogen, and oxygen, and another simple substance, non-metallic and solid, carbon. ”

“ When this element, nitrogen, is combined with the wonderful variety of compounds formed by carbon, we have not only a great many intimately related yet distinct [100] substances, but compounds which readily change from one form to another. These are the distinctive qualities or conditions necessary, from a chemical standpoint, to make the processes of life possible. Protoplasm, which is the basis of all life, is formed by an intimate mixture of a number of complex chemical compounds, the chief elements of which are carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. ”

“ We see and feel and taste an acid or an alkali, and know something of the qualities of each; but it is only when we use them in combination with other substances, and learn their effects, that we really begin to know their nature. It is the combination and experiments of Chemistry that give us a knowledge of the nature and powers of most animal and vegetable substances. ”

“ Every purely chemical examination—whether proximate or ultimate—of a compound, presupposes the destruction of the substance under examination: the chemist "murders to dissect." But observations on the action of a substance on the rays of light, on the relative volumes occupied by molecular quantities of a substance, on its velocity of transpiration in the liquid or gaseous state—these teach us the habits of the living substance. ”

“ Any good chemist can analyze a fertilized ovum and learn, exactly, the chemical elements of which it is composed, and the proportions in which they are combined. He could then make a new combination of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen in the same proportions, in which these substances were combined in the fertilized ovum; and if life were a property of that combination of atoms, this new chemical compound, ought to become a living creature. ”

“ This chlorophyl-tinged protoplasm is the substratum in which carbonic acid is deprived of its oxygen, and organically incorporated. Here, and here alone, organic substance originates in Nature. [1] It is the one magic gate through which the inorganic effects its passage into the organic; the one transubstantiating medium by which the death-like spell of inertness is broken and the dormant energies of matter admitted to bloom forth into life. ”

“ After becoming acquainted with the constituent elements of all the substances within our reach and the mutual relations of these elements, the remarkable transmutations to which the bodies are subject under the influence of the vital powers of plants and animals, became the principal object of chemical investigations, and the highest point of interest. A new science, inexhaustible as life itself, is here presented us, standing upon the sound and solid foundation of a well established inorganic chemistry. ”

“ Now, relying on these discoveries, as well as upon the successful demonstration, by inorganic means, of organic acids in chemistry, and starting from the supposition that the first appearance of life must necessarily be explained by those agencies which are already active in the inorganic nature, many scientists have attempted the so-called mechanical explanation of life. ”

“ No chemist will ever claim to have formed in his laboratory a leaf, a fruit, a muscle, or an organ.... But chemistry has a right to claim that it forms direct principles—that is to say, the chemical materials which constitute the organs.” And Claude Bernard in the same way writes:—“In a word, the chemist in his laboratory, and the living organism in its apparatus, work in the same way, but each with its own tools. The chemist can make the products of the living being, but he will never make the tools, because they are the result of organic morphology.” ”

“ Under the term chemical affinity, which we regard as a power acting at insensible distances, and producing a change in bodies, we are content to allow ourselves to believe that we have explained the great operations of nature. We find that the vegetable and animal kingdoms are composed of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. The granite mountains of the earth, and its limestone hills, and all its other geological formations, are found to be metals and oxygen, and carbon and sulphur, disposed to settle in harmonious union in their proper places by chemical affinity. ”

“ Chemists tell us of an element essential to our life—we breathe it every moment; it contributes to the balance of all the powers of the atmosphere; it tames the subtle, fiery-tempered oxygen, the wild and vehement hydrogen; it represses, allays, and composes, but itself has no colour no odour ”

“ We come next to the agency of chief importance among those that work changes in organic matter; namely, chemical affinity. How readily vegetal and animal substances are modified by other substances put in contact with them, we see daily illustrated. Besides the many compounds which cause the death of an organism into which they are put, we have the much greater number of compounds which work those milder effects termed medicinal—effects implying, like the others, molecular re-arrangements. ”

“ There are sixteen chemical elements absolutely essential to healthy human life, which are classified by physiological chemistry as the elements of organic life. In the composition of vital tissues we constantly find these basal elements: Carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, sulphur, phosphorus, chlorine, potassium, sodium, magnesium, calcium, iron, manganese, fluorine, silicon, and iodine. ”

“ Their method, being founded on trials of real fact, cleared itself more and more from the magical folly it had grown up with, and the alchemist prepared the way for the later chemist. What of all things brought on the new chemical knowledge, was the explanation of what takes place in burning, rusting, and breathing. How is it that the air in a receiver is spoilt by a burning candle or a mouse within, so that it no longer allows flame or life? How is it that while some substances, like charcoal, seem to be dissipated by fire, others, like lead or iron, turn into matter heavier than before? ”

“ And I will begin with reminding you of the Experiments I not long since related to you concerning the growth of pompions, mint, and other vegetables, out of fair water. For by those experiments its seems evident, that Water may be Transmuted into all the other Elements; from whence it may be inferr’d, both, That ’tis not every Thing Chymists will call Salt, Sulphur, or Spirit, that needs alwayes be a Primordiate and Ingenerable body. And that Nature may contex a Plant (though that be a perfectly mixt Concrete) without having all the Elements previously presented to her to compound it of. ”

“ The substances which the chemists take to be simple bodies—oxygen, hydrogen, azote, iron, gold, silver, etc.—are mineral elements which have been gradually formed and differentiated, just as, later, the vegetable and animal species were differentiated. And not only is the substance of the world one, but it also has the same origin as energy, and these two forms are mutually interchangeable. Nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed. ”

“ And if every step which we advance in the knowledge of the intimate structure of things leads us to contract the number of substances formerly held to be simple, I would not wonder if it should yet turn out that oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen are, like what the ancients held the elements to be—all nothing else but different modifications of one ever-changing matter. ”

“ Science may at some time teach us how to bring the chemical constituents of protoplasm into that combination in which they possess the faculty of starting the oxidations under those conditions which characterize life ”

“ In the inorganic world we have crystalline forms exhibiting an obedience to the most perfect geometrical laws; and in organic creation—from the lowly lichen to the stateliest tree, from the infusorial inhabitants of a drop of water up to man—we have molecule combining with molecule in a myriad ways, but in all{181} of them producing results which charm by their adaptation to circumstances, and in the perfection of every organ. ”

“ In dealing with the question of the antiquity of chemical art, it has been too much the habit to look at the question with a view of discovering when and who it was that first brought forth, fully clothed as a science, the art of chemistry. ”

“ Not only the chemical compounds are the same, but the same infinitesimal invisible lives compose the atoms of the bodies of the mountain and the daisy, of man and the ant, of the elephant, and of the tree which shelters him from the sun. Each particle—whether you call it organic or inorganic—is a life. ”

“ But it may be convenient to treat the subject of the artificial production of this group of bodies rather more comprehensively and as a sub-section of this chapter on organic synthesis, since their formation by such means constitutes a phase in the development of chemistry, and has undoubtedly exercised a profound influence on scientific thought and on philosophical and even theological doctrine. During the past fifty or sixty years the chemist has been enabled to form the active principles or characteristic products of many plants and animals. ”

“ You know enough chemistry to realize that everything—water, air, food, all things which we use in every-day life—are merely combinations of certain simple elements. As you have seen me, by means of an electric current, decompose a jar of pure water into its two component parts,—two molecules of hydrogen to every molecule of oxygen,—so you can bring these same elements together in the gaseous state ”

“ Or,—to change the figure for the better—just as the chemist, in causing chlorine and hydrogen to form hydrochloric acid, finds that he must not only put the chlorine and hydrogen together, but he must put them together in the presence of light in order to make them combine; so the poet of our time will find that his poetic combinations, his grandest syntheses of wisdom, own this law; and they, too, must be effected in the presence of the awful light of science. ”

“ As a matter of fact, it can be shown that it is to the purely scientific chemist, working with the main object of building up the science, that we owe the discovery of most valuable remedies, at least of those which are strictly speaking chemical compounds. I select for this purpose two substances which have but comparatively recently found their places in the materia medica—viz., chloral and salicylic acid. How and by whom were these substances discovered and introduced into medicine? ”

“ Chemical analysis has achieved the dissolution of the numberless varieties of matter presented to our notice, and proved them to arise merely from diverse combinations of a few simple elements; and electrical research has almost visually approached 232 that primordial substance in which is conceived to exist the ultimate unity of all things. [942] Synthetical chemistry has acquired the skill to control the inherent affinities of nature, and to compel her energies to the production of myriads of hitherto unknown compounds. ”

“ If all animals and plants have been obtained by the secular synthesis of transformed monera, and the differentiation of the organs composing them—thus giving in the last analysis one form and kind of protoplasm as the root of all; the pursuit of the same line of thought—the same theory, applied to the atoms of the chemist, with their various properties and atomic weights, gives, as the common ground of all, a single material element; each chemical atom being a structure composed of this material element, but so stable as to be indecomposable in the laboratory. ”

“ At present, we have to recognise the existence of extremely small quantities, widely distributed in rocks and waters, of some thirty substances, the minute particles of which are constantly emitting streams of more minute, identical particles that carry with them very large quantities of energy, all of which thirty substances are characterised, and are differentiated from all other classes of substances wherewith chemistry is concerned, by their spontaneous mutability, and each is characterised by its special rate of change and by the nature of the products of its mutations. ”