19th-century Chemist Quotes

In attempting to discover traces of a science in earliest historic times, one must first disabuse his mind of the idea that he will find it in anything like the elaborated modern form in which he knows it. These natural sciences are the result of a long process of evolution, and the primal form will probably prove a very much disguised one.

Francis Preston Venable

The little Daisy, which has painted its 'wee crimson-tipped flowers,' puts the chemist and scientific man to shame, for it has produced its leaf and stem and flowers, and has dyed these with their bright colors from materials which he can never change with all his art.

Friedlieb Ferdinand Runge

There is inherent in the human mind a desire to find an explanation - or as some would prefer to have it called, a description - of the phenomena of nature, by means of speculations concerning the ultimate constitution of matter.

Theories cannot claim to be indestructible. They are only the plough which the ploughman uses to draw his furrow and which he has every right to discard for another one, of improved design, after the harvest.

Paul Sabatier (chemist)

Practically everything your eat, taste, wear, smell and see has resulted in some way from the ingenuity of chemists.

Marston T. Bogert

Before delivering your lectures, the manuscript should be in such a perfect form that, if need be, it could be set in type. Whether you follow the manuscript during the delivery of the lecture is purely incidental. The essential point is that you are thus master of the subject matter.

The periodic law has given to chemistry that prophetic power long regarded as the peculiar dignity of its sister science, astronomy.

Henry Carrington Bolton

They [Kekule and Zincke] found, as the result of their research, that Kegnault's statements were perfectly correct, and that chloracetene possessed, besides other remarkable properties, that of non-existence!

Carl Schorlemmer

I consider the teaching and study of the historical development of science as indispensable... Our textbooks fail in this respect.

Richard Willstätter

We believe in atoms, because Nature seems to use them, and we break them up continuously because we do not know where to stop. There are various methods of spanning the distance from nothing to something.

Robert Angus Smith

Nitrogen bacteria teach us that Nature, with her sophisticated forms of the chemistry of living matter, still understands and utilizes methods, which we do not as yet know how to imitate.

A successful hypothesis is not necessarily a permanent hypothesis, but it is one which stimulates additional research, opens up new fields, or explains and coordinates previously unrelated facts.

Farrington Daniels

The endless frontiers of science now stretching to the stars can provide rich opportunities for the best creative minds.

Edward R. Weidlein

Astronomy is, not without reason, regarded, by mankind, as the sublimest of the natural sciences. Its objects, so frequently visible, and therefore familiar, being always remote and inaccessible, do not lose their dignity.

Benjamin Silliman Jr.

When men began to use their hands and eyes as well as their reason in attempting to get at nature's secrets, doubts arose whether the explanations and hypotheses of the gown-men were not rather strained, and for the most part unsatisfactory.

Thomas Edward Thorpe

Someone has said that the benzene theory appeared like a meteor from the sky. It came absolutely new and uninitiated. The human mind does not work in this manner. Nothing has ever been thought of which is absolutely new, certainly not in chemistry...

Friedrich August Kekulé

I was an impostor, the worthy associate of a brigand, &c., &c., and all this for an atom of chlorine put in the place of an atom of hydrogen, for the simple correction of a chemical formula!

Auguste Laurent

Be a physical chemist, an analytical chemist, an organic chemist, if you will; but above all, be a chemist.

For us, an atom shall be a small, spherical, homogeneous body or an essentially indivisible, material point, whereas a molecule shall be a separate group of atoms in any number and of any nature.

Marc Antoine Gaudin

No one can predict how far we shall be enabled by means of our limited intelligence to penetrate into the mysteries of a universe immeasurably vast and wonderful; nevertheless, each step in advance is certain to bring new blessings to humanity and new inspiration to greater endeavor.

Theodore William Richards

The abundance of substances of which animals and plants are composed, the remarkable processes whereby they are formed and then broken down again have claimed the attention of mankind of old, and hence from the early days they also persistently captivated the interest of chemists.

Hermann Emil Fischer

If molecules can be structurally identical and yet possess dissimilar properties, this can be explained only on the ground that the difference is due to a different arrangement of the atoms in space.

Johannes Wislicenus

Boyle entertains the hypothesis of a universal matter, the concept of atoms of different shapes and sizes, and the possibility of existence of substances that might properly be called elements... The atomic theory as originally conceived by Democritus and Epicurus, developed by Lucretius, and resurrected by Gassendi from about 1647 on, was doubtless the source from which Boyle derived his ideas,...as he cites both Epicurus and Gassendi. Boyle, however... avoids any dogmatic assertion of these hypotheses. It is plain, however, that these atoms or "corpuscles" as he calls them are a constant element of his thought.

John Maxson Stillman

See all electrons are alike, and presumably leave no trail behind them, we cannot say that atom A loses an electron to atom B and atom C to atom D, but only that Atoms A and C have each lost an electron and atoms B and D have each gained one.

Gilbert N. Lewis

It is clear, however, that the distinguishing mark of the whole development of theoretical chemistry and physics is the elimination of the anthropomorphic elements, especially specific sense-impressions, from the concepts. This process is called by Prof. M. Planck the objectification of the physical system.

J. R. Partington