An inaugural dissertation on a natural system of chemical classification : submitted to the public examination of the trustees and of the faculty of medicine of the College of Physicians and Surgeons in the city of New York, under the authority of the regents of the University of the State of New York, Alexander H. Stevens, M.D., president of the college and of the board of trustees for the degree of doctor of medicine, on the 6th day of February, 1845. / By Oliver Wolcott Gibbs, A.M. of the city of New York.

Oliver Wolcott Gibbs

Date:: 1845

Credit: An inaugural dissertation on a natural system of chemical classification : submitted to the public examination of the trustees and of the faculty of medicine of the College of Physicians and Surgeons in the city of New York, under the authority of the regents of the University of the State of New York, Alexander H. Stevens, M.D., president of the college and of the board of trustees for the degree of doctor of medicine, on the 6th day of February, 1845. / By Oliver Wolcott Gibbs, A.M. of the city of New York. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University Libraries/Information Services, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University.

22/72 page 16

$little understood to admit of anything more than a general ap- plication of these relations to the purpose of classification. We shall point out in speaking of the several groups, the elec- trical conditions of each, agreeably to the theory of Faraday and Berzelius, though we do not propose to adopt this as the basis of classification, as is now very commonly done. 8. The influence which the chemical constitution of a body exerts upon the transmission, reflection, absorption or polari- zation of Light, has hitherto excited very little attention. No connexion has been traced between the refractive power of a compound and the refractive powers of its constituents, and very few data exist with which to institute a comparison- Possibly the action of bodies upon Light may be] connected with their Atomic Numbers, but the whole subject is involved in the deepest obscurity and presents a noble field for experi- mental research. 9. It remains to consider in a brief and general manner, the purely chemical relations of bodies to each other, that is to say, the relations of constitution, of acidity and basidity, of molecu- lar types and of general character and properties. The mole- cular type of any substance is of the utmost importance in the determination of the group to which it belongs. As the ele- ments are to the best of our knowledge identical in this partic- ular, we are obliged, in order to investigate their chemical re- lations, to examine the molecular structure of the compounds which they form with one another, and from these to deduce the general character of each. We find then that a natural group of Elements, by entering into combination with other elements, forms a series ot compounds whose molecular struc- tures are precisely similar to one another, and which may be transformed the one into the other by a simple change in the chemical symbols which constitute the formulae. In like man- ner a natural group of compound bodies is composed of sub- stances which are exactly parallel to one another, both in com- position and in the arrangement of their constituents. Bodies which are similarly constituted exhibit for the most part very$

Licence and re-use

Contents