The Romance of Modern Chemistry

CHAPTER XXII HOW MAN COMPETES WITH NATURE EVERY one has doubtless observed that in the grow- ing infant the bump of destructiveness is early developed, and that it is only at a later stage that this impulse to take things in pieces is succeeded by the desire to put together—to construct. In the gradual de- velopment of the science of chemistry we can detect similar stages. In one of these the energies of chemical workers were mainly directed to breaking down all the various substances found in nature, and discovering the simplest elements of which matter consists. At another and later stage attention has been chiefly directed to building up from simpler materials the various products of the earth. We might, in fact, speak of the one method of work as destructive and of the other as constructive. Such de- structive work, or analysis, as the chemist calls it, has, however, served a very useful purpose; it was necessary to demolish the fantastic structures of the alchemists, and to get down to the bed-rock of fact, before <1 building could be reared worthy of the name of science. Once the foundation was well and truly laid, the constructive woik of building—synthesis, as the chemist calls it—could be taken in hand. Why, the reader may ask, should we trouble ourselves to build up substances which Nature readily supplies? 248