this one, conducted, like it, with very simple compounds, till he was finally led to the artificial composition of the carburets of hydrogen. Among his most important experiments in this line was the artificial production of alcohol from defiant gas. Alcohol once obtained synthetically, he had a station whence he could pursue his investigations in various directions. It was not a long step from this to the composition with the same elements (oxygen, hydrogen, and carbon) of a number of volatile organic substances such as the oils of garlic, mustard, etc—. and then to the formation of glycerine. With these processes he had built up by synthesis what we might perhaps call the first story of organic chemistry. To complete his work it was necessary to produce the saccharine and albuminous substances which constitute what might be called, repeating our figure, the second story of the edifice—a problem of a more difficult character, because those substances are less stable in their nature, and are more completely decomposed under energetic chemical reactions. On this subject M. Berthelot said, several years ago: "The reconstitution of the saccharine and albuminoid principles is the final object of organic chemistry, the most remote one indeed, but also one of the most important, on account of the essential part which these principles play in our economy. When science attains it, it will be able to realize the synthetic problem in its whole extent—that is, to produce, with the elements and by the play of molecular forces alone, all the definite natural compounds and all the changes which matter undergoes in the bodies of living beings."
"The labors of M. Berthelot in this line," says an enthusiastic French biographer, "constitute one of those events which change the aspect of things, not only by the new processes which they have developed, or by the substances, more or less known, which they have given the means of reproducing, but because they have taken hold bodily of one of the strongest intrenched ideas of mankind and overthrown it. We had been taught that all the complex substances constituting plants and animals were produced wholly under the influence of a special vital force peculiar to organized beings. When it came to verifying the facts in the case, it was found that Nature acts in a more simple way than we had thought, and that she employs those chemical affinities that control the metamorphoses of matter equally in executing those immense earth-convulsions that stir the foundations of countries and overthrow cities, and in perfuming a flower by the distillation, molecule by molecule, of its essential oil."
The fruits of M. Berthelot's investigations in this department of research have been given in a number of publications, among which we may name the "Combinaisons de la glycérine avec les acides, et reproduction des corps gras neutres" ("Combinations of Glycerine with the Acids, and Reproduction of Neutral Fatty Bodies"), 1860; various memoirs in the "Annales de physique et de chimie"; "Chimie organique fondée sur la synthèse" ("Organic Chemistry founded on
