Excerpt from The Chemical Gazette, or Journal of Practical Chemistry, 1852, Vol. 10: In All Its Applications to Pharmacy, Arts, and Manufactures All previous arguments in favour of the hypothesis of polymeric isomorphism have been founded upon facts derived from inorganic chemistry, and yet it is probable that these relations occupy a more important place in the organic world than in the inorganic. There is no doubt that it is among organic compounds in which vicarious constituents do not occur, as in inorganic bodies, and where couse quently the mode of formation may be more easily traced, and the resulting products are more definite, that the most striking instances of polymeric isomorphism might be obtained, if it were possible on the one hand to prepare rea ily measurable crystals, and if on the other a crystallographic determination of all measurable organic crystalline compounds had been made. I. In the-study of the decomposition-products of organic bodies, an analogy in composition has frequently presented itself between a great number of bodies which could not be detected by direct ana lysis. This relation between bodies has been called homology. Gerhardt calls all those bodies homologous which differ from each other by n(c2 H9), and lays down the empirical law, that when two bodies have such compositions that the one may be expressed by that of the other, 72(c=2 hq), they have both analogous characters, i.a. Similar relations of combination and decomposition. If this analogy of characters extends itself to the form of the crystals, the law may be thus expressed z - All organic bodies which belong to an homo logons series are isomorphous. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.