Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, January 1899: Volume LIV, No. 3, January 1899Various
Science
Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, January 1899: Volume LIV, No. 3, January 1899
Various
Science -- Periodicals; Technology -- Periodicals
Kekulé assumed his last position, as professor at the University of
Bonn, in the fall of 1867. He there devoted his attention for a period
to the erection of a new institute building, but it was not long
before numerous works began again to appear--some of them by himself
alone, like the important investigation of the condensation products
of aldehyde; and others in co-operation with his many students. The
continuation of his _Lehrbuch_ was taken in hand at the same time. In
1867 he gratified his fellow-chemists by the publication of the first
volume of his Chemistry of the Benzol Derivatives. This was followed
from 1880 to 1887 by single numbers, prepared with the help of
co-workers, of the second and third volumes.
Prof. F. R. Japp, in the Kekulé memorial lecture before the Chemical
Society of London, speaking of Kekulé's residence in that city,
September, 1897, said that he always acknowledged the influence which
Liebig and Odling and Williamson, with whom he became acquainted in
London, exercised on the formation of his opinions. Kekulé's theories,
Professor Japp said, were based on Gerhardt's type theory; on
Williamson's theory of polyvalent radicals, which by their power of
linking together other radicals render possible the existence of
multiple types; and Odling's theory of mixed types, which was a
deduction from Williamson's theory. Less consciously, perhaps, his
opinions were influenced by E. Frankland's theory of the valency of
elementary atoms, and by Kolbe's speculation on the constitution of
organic compounds. Kekulé gathered together the various ideas which he
found scattered throughout the writings of his predecessors, added to
them, and welded the whole into the consistent system which forms our
present theory of chemical structure. In 1857, in the course of a
memoir on the constitution of fulminic acid, he gave a tabular
arrangement of compounds formulated on the type of marsh gas, this
being the earliest statement, though put forward only in an imperfect
form, of the tetravalency of carbon. In the same year he published an
important theoretical paper On the So-called Conjugated Compounds and
the Theory of Polyatomic Radicals, which contains a complete system of
multiple types and mixed types. In 1858 the celebrated paper, On the
Constitution and Metamorphoses of Chemical Compounds, and on the
Chemical Nature of Carbon, appeared. It embodies the fully developed
doctrine of the tetravalency of carbon, together with Kekulé's views
on the linking of atoms and on the valency of such chains of atoms,
the foundation on which our modern system of constitutional chemistry
rests. In 1865 Kekulé put forward his well-known benzene
theory--pronounced by Professor Japp the crowning achievement, in his
hands, of the doctrine of the linking of atoms, and the most brilliant
piece of scientific prediction to be found in the whole range of
organic chemistry. The conception of closed chains, or cycloids, which
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