Excerpt from The Chemical News and Journal of Physical Science, Vol. 19: A Journal of Practical Chemistry in All Its Applications to Pharmacy, Arts, and Manufactures It is difficult to measure the distance between this mer chant consulting the astronomer, and the astronomer him self, who has a difficulty in making his visitor understand that he cannot read the future. Let us say the difference is two thousand years. Let us also pause a moment to consider the progress made by the astronomer in two thousand years. Perhaps the first man that counted by seconds was one who found the pendulum to be his own heart - a heart quietly beating after the violence of youth was over, sixty times a minute. The period of one beat has become for mankind a symbol of shortness; it is a length of time passing too rapidly to be calmly surveyed, and to speak of the movements in the sky to such accuracy was not to be thought of. There was no mode of measure ment. Now the ear itself has become critical beyond the heart, and it dares to measure to one-tenth, whilst the intellect, with a refinement beyond its own full compre hension, divides the same period into a million, and the strange laws of nature placidly permit that mechanism shall be formed for the purpose. The man of the dark past, although he is living now amongst us, may have heard that from the great distances in space we see in stars that which has existed many years ago, and may think that we have only to turn the telescope and, by looking the other way, see equally far into the future. We have sympathy even with him, and we too would like 'to know the future of chemistry and even of man.' But we are among chemists and not astronomers, ai though when we look far back chemistry offers us few illus trations. Since we first took up a piece of earth and said to ourselves of what is this made we have a long line of men, each striving to be more accurate than his neigh bour. We do often wish that we could take up a history of these later men, written not merely in English but by Englishmen who had read and weighed everything for themselves. For our facts we must go either to the origi nais or to the Germans. We hnd in these rich volumes by Kopp abundance of matter well weighed, perhaps with as muchjustice to Englishmen as they could do themselves, but we should like to see it written with a warm heart towards our fellows, seeking out every corner as justice alone cannot, but as kindness only can. We turn to France and there we find a' history truly original also, but with a name that sounds surely German - it is Hoefer. Well, we cannot blame them we are thankful. 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.