The Romance of Chemistry [antikvár]

Foreword It is nature, of course, that is the great chemist. Every growing plant is a marvelous chemical factory, every living thing a brilliant shifter of atoms from one bewildering compound to another. And down in the depths of the earth enormous forces operate to create the minerals that someday may be close to the earth's surface. It was not an easy matter for the human mind to understand what was happening in even the simplest of such chemical changes. The atoms could not be seen, for they are almost unbelievably small. Then after many centuries man the chemist caught a glimpse of what might be happening. His mind saw things that his eyes could not discern or his fingers sort out. He had created the idea of the atom—and the chemistry of the world began, slowly, to be understandable. Keith Gordon Irwin