On Growth and Form

INTRODUCTORY

Of the chemistry of his day and generation, Kant declared that it was “a science, but not science,”—“eine Wissenschaft, aber nicht Wissenschaft”; for that the criterion of physical science lay in its relation to mathematics. And a hundred years later Du Bois Reymond, profound student of the many sciences on which physiology is based, recalled and reiterated the old saying, declaring that chemistry would only reach the rank of science, in the high and strict sense, when it should be found possible to explain chemical reactions in the light of their causal relation to the velocities, tensions and conditions of equilibrium of the component molecules; that, in short, the chemistry of the future must deal with molecular mechanics, by the methods and in the strict language of mathematics, as the astronomy of Newton and Laplace dealt with the stars in their courses. We know how great a step has been made towards this distant and once hopeless goal, as Kant defined it, since van’t Hoff laid the firm foundations of a mathematical chemistry, and earned his proud epitaph, Physicam chemiae adiunxit.