Chemistry of organic bodies. Vegetables / By Thomas Thomson.

  • Thomas Thomson
Date:
1838
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Chemistry of organic bodies. Vegetables / By Thomas Thomson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    tion of my next volume on Animal Substances, which will complete my plan. ‘The first of these is the great and unexpected size to which this volume has swelled. This has rendered it necessary to leave out every thing that did not constitute an essential part of the subject. The second circumstance, which induced me to delay the descrip- tion of the mode of the analysis to the next volume, is the very minute details of that method which have been given by Liebig and Dumas, the two chemists to whom we are indebted for the greatest number, and the most accurate vegetable analyses which we possess. Liebig contrived the most important part of the apparatus; and in his Handworterbuch (dictionary) der reinen und angewandten Chemie, under the word Analyse, organische, he has given such minute de- tails of the whole steps of the process, accompanied by accurate figures of the apparatus, that every chemist, who peruses it with care, can feel no difficulty in analyzing any vegetable substance whatever. Professor Liebig has published this article as a separate pamphlet. Were any person to favour us with an English transla- tion of it, he would contribute essentially to promote the prosecu- tion of vegetable chemistry in Great Britain, and would be confer- ring an important favour on the British chemical public. Dumas, in the Introduction to the 5th volume of his Traité de Chimie ap- pliquée aux Arts, has also given a minute detail of the methods of analyzing vegetable bodies, and pointed out various methods of checking the errors to which the method is liable, and of deducing the atomic weight from methods independent of the elementary analysis. His observations are highly worthy of an attentive per- usal, and cannot fail to communicate much useful information. Professor Mitscherlich of Berlin, has made some attempts to im- prove the apparatus of Liebig; though I doubt whether the addi- tional accuracy is not more than compensated by the complicated nature of his improvements. To him, as well as to H. Rose, Pe- louse, and some other young French chemists, we are indebted for a great number of accurate vegetable analyses.
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