Chemistry.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXIX, Issue 1, 3 January 1901, Page 17

Chemistry.

In the fields of chemistry and physics discovery tripped the heels of discovery in a way that was bewildering to oldfashioned people who were wedded to the snuffers, the flint and steel, the stage coach, the blunderbuss, and ' the tinkling harpsichord ' of a century ago. Modern chemistry owed much to the investigations of the old alchemists who toiled and moiled in a vain search for the philosopher's stone. The late Professor C. S. Wiertz said that modern chemistry is a French science. Its fouuder was Lavoisier, a pious French Catholic whose head was docked by the guillotine during the wild troubles of 1794. And ever since his day the working theories of the science, its philosophy, and a great number of its most important discoveries have, says Dr. Zahm, ' given to the French a prestige and a position as chemical investigators that place them far in advance of their competitors.' Three of the most distinguished chemists of modern times were Frenchmen and devout Catholics : Henri Victoire Dumas Michel Chevreul, and Antoine Cesar Becquerel. The last mentioned was the creator of the science of electro-chemistry. Another great and devout Catholic savant was Louis Pasteur : chemist, microscopist, bacteriologist, physicist, »n 1 altogether one of the most remarkable scientific men of any age or country. So far back as 1856 he was noted throughout Europe for the originality and success of his investigations into the hidden activities of nature. He traced diseases to their source. He clapped bit and bridle, co to speak, upon microscopic organisms and trained them to aid the human being to combat disease. His discoveries enabled Lister to devise the antiseptic system of treatment now universally applied in surgery. He was greatly distinguished for his researches in fermentation ; discovered the bacilli of various putrefactive diseases; introduced preventive methods circumventing their depredations by inoculation ; and discovered antidotes for hydrophobia and for various diseases that till his day had wrought red havoc among fowls, sheep, cattle, and silkworms. Of English chemists the most distinguished were John Dalton and Sir Humphry Davy. The latter saved great numbers of lives in coal-mines, etc., by his in' vention of the safety lamp. Metallurgical chemist: y lms smoothed the path and lined the pockets of the miner and enabled Knurr, Bessemer, Armstrong, and others to revolutionise the manufacture of iron and steel. In the person of the agricultural chemist, the nineteenth century produced the great public benefactor foreshadowed by Dean Swift in the eighteenth. ' Whoever,' said the Dean of Ht. Patrick's in his Gulliver's Travels (1726), 'could make two ears of corn, oi two blades of grass, to grow upon a spot where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind and do more essential service to his country than the whole race of politicians put together.' Organic chemistry

has given us, among other things, high explosives such m dynamite and nitro-glycerine, coal-tar and its wonderful series of dyes and other by-products; it has produoed artificially dye indigo, citric acid, and other substances long supposed to be due to organio processes alone, and has led to some of the best known and most popular discoveries of the nineteenth century. And experiments in phenomenally low temperatures and in the raging heat of the electric furnace have liquefied and even solidified the various gases and melted or vaporised the most solid and hitherto refractory elements in nature.