Chemie der alicyklischen Verbindungen

Abstract

FEW reflections are more curious than those which contrast the manifold complexity of the organic chemistry of the present day with the crude simplicity of the fundamental conceptions upon which it has been built up. Broadly speaking, these conceptions are but two in number—first, the almost repulsively mechanical atomic theory of Dalton, which we still retain in practically its original form, and second, the irritatingly mysterious doctrine of valency introduced by Frankland and Kekulé, also still preserved much as it was enunciated, but which eludes our grasp and sets us chasing shadows so soon as we attempt to translate it into definite mechanical conceptions. Yet, on the ground-work afforded by these two conceptions, so irreconcilable in their nature and so hopelessly crude in the eyes of the physicist, the organic chemist has built up a purely experimental science which embraces hundreds of thousands of different substances within a scheme as perfect as any known to science, which classifies with similar perfection the reactions by means of which those substances are produced and the behaviour which they exhibit, and has led to the synthetic preparation of hosts of compounds the production of which our immediate predecessors regarded as amongst the most intimate secrets of animal and vegetable life.

Chemie der alicyklischen Verbindungen.

By Prof. Ossian Aschan. Pp. xlv + 1163. (Brunswick: Vieweg und Sohn, 1905.) Price 40 marks.