The limits of this work preclude a more detailed account of one of the most interesting but at the same time one of the most obscure departments of chemistry. The field has hitherto been tilled in a somewhat intermittent and partial manner. Now that it has been entered by chemists of experience and resourcefulness, armed with modern methods of cultivation, it will doubtless soon yield a rich harvest of facts, valuable alike to the physiologist and the physician.
There can be no reasonable doubt that the chemical processes of organic life are essentially similar to those of the laboratory. The doctrine that a special “vital force” is concerned in the production of vital products receives no support from the teaching of modern science, and is, indeed, contradicted by it. At the same time, it must be admitted that we know very little as yet of the real agencies at work in the elaboration and mutations of chemical products in the living organism. Because we have effected the putting together of such a product by purely laboratory processes—it may be, indeed, by a variety of different and dissimilar processes—it by no means follows that any one of them is identical with that actually occurring in nature. The building up of materials in the plant by the agency of light, for example, has not yet been imitated in the laboratory. Many plant products are produced by the action of unorganised ferments—so-called enzymes—none of which the chemist has succeeded in creating.
Processes akin to condensation undoubtedly occur in the living organism; but the means by which they are effected are, in all probability, very different from anything known to the chemist at present. Many laboratory condensations are only accomplished at relatively high temperatures or under considerable pressure—or, in other words, under totally different conditions from those which obtain in the organism.
ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF PHYSICAL CHEMISTRY SINCE 1850
Chemistry and physics are each complementary to the other: that region of inquiry in which they mutually overlap is known as _physical chemistry_. Its beginnings are practically contemporaneous with those of chemistry itself. Its main development has occurred, however, during the last twenty-five years. Certain of its leading features have been referred to already in connection with the establishment of the fundamental principles of chemistry, the explanation of the so-called gaseous laws, the constitution of gases, the relations of their volumes to heat and pressure, and the conditions affecting their transition to the liquid state.