[CHAPTER VI.]
CHEMISTRY.
Chemistry, having for its field the properties and changes of matter, has excited more or less attention ever since men had the power to observe, to think, and to experiment.
Some knowledge of chemistry must have existed among the ancients to have enabled the Egyptians to smelt ores and work metals, to dye their cloths, to make glass, and to preserve their dead from decomposition; so, too, to this extent among the Phœnicians, the Israelites, the Greeks and the Romans; and perhaps to a greater extent among the Chinese, who added powder to the above named and other chemical products. Aristotle speculated, and the alchemists of the middle ages busied themselves in magic and guess-work. It reached the dignity of a science in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, by the labours of such men, in the former century, as Libavius, Van Helmont, Glauber, Tachenius, Boyle, Lémery and Becher; Stahl, Boerhaave and Hamberg in both; and of Black, Cavendish, Lavoisier, Priestley and others in the eighteenth.
But so great have been the discoveries and inventions in this science during the nineteenth century that any chemist of any previous age, if permitted to look forward upon them, would have felt
“Like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken.”
Indeed, the chemistry of this century is a new world, of which all the previous discoveries in that line were but floating nebulæ.
So vast and astonishingly fast has been the growth and development of this science that before the century was two-thirds through its course Watts published his Dictionary of Chemistry in five volumes, averaging a thousand closely printed pages, followed soon by a thousand-page supplement; and it would have required such a volume every year since to adequately report the progress of the science. Nomenclatures, formulas, apparatuses and processes have all changed. It was deemed necessary to publish works on The New Chemistry, and Professor J. P. Cooke is the author of an admirable volume under that title.
We can, therefore, in this chapter only step from one to another of some of the peaks that rise above the vast surrounding country, and note some of the lesser objects as they appear in the vales below.