A class-book of chemistry : in which the principles of the science are familiarly explained and applied to the arts, agriculture, physiology, dietetics, ventilation, and the most important phenomena of nature : designed for the use of academies and schools and for popular reading / by Edward L. Youmans.

  • Youmans, Edward Livingston, 1821-1887.
Date:
1858
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A class-book of chemistry : in which the principles of the science are familiarly explained and applied to the arts, agriculture, physiology, dietetics, ventilation, and the most important phenomena of nature : designed for the use of academies and schools and for popular reading / by Edward L. Youmans. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

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    experiments, and are among the established facts of chemicaJ physiology. As man is thus, from necessity and by natm-e, a chemist, his bodily system being a chemical apparatus, and each act of eating, drmking, breathing, and digestion, a chemical ex- periment ; and as this chemical action goes on at a rapid rate, involving the conditions of health and disease, and never ceasing for an instant from buih to death, it is certainly proper that he should understand something of a science of which he is himself so complete and -wonderful an illustration. Few subjects can compare, either in interest or importance, with that wliich infoiTos us of what our physical being is com- posed, the character and object of those remarkable changes which incessantly take place within us, and the nature of our relations to the sui-rounding world. Physiology, which teaches the structure and uses of the vaiious parts of the human body, is pursued as a regular branch of study in a great number of schools; it should be in all. But physiology is in a large measure dependent upon chemistiy for the ex- planation of its principles; and the discoveries of every suc- ceeding year tend to make that dependence more and more complete. Chemistry possesses also great interest from its apphcation to the arts of daily life. It is the object of industry in acting upon the outward world to produce two classes of changes in the materials whiih it employs. The fost are mechanical changes, which influence only the forms of matter, as in the operations of cabinet-making and cotton-spinning: the second are chemical changes, wrought in the nature of the substances used, and altering their properties, as m glass-making and tanning. In both these cases the changes which take place are governed by certain fixed principles or laws, to which the workman must conform if he would operate successfully.