"The notation of chemistry enabled these ideas to be represented with precision; and they acquired an immense importance, when the improvement of methods of analysis, which took place about the beginning of our period enabled the composition of the so called 'organic' bodies to be determined with rapidity and precision. A large proportion of these compounds contain not more than three or four elements, of which carbon is the chief; but their number is very great, and the diversity of their physical and chemical properties is astonishing. The ascertainment of the proportion of each element in these compounds affords little or no help towards accounting for their diversities; widely different bodies being often very similar, or even identical, in that respect. And in the last case, that of isomeric compounds, the appeal to diversity of arrangement of the identical component units was the only obvious way out of the difficulty."
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The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century
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