Technikatörténeti szemle 22. (1996)

Papers from the Second International Conference on the History of Chemistry and Chemical Industry (Eger, Hungary, 16–19 August, 1995) - Lichocka, Halina: The Methodological Problems of Organis Chemistry in the First Half of the 19th Century – Jedrzej Sniadeckis work

dency, inherent in matter, for elements to combine to form a new substance, while the second were described as the effect of individual action which, on the one hand, was directed against chemical compounds and physical attraction, and on the other, bound the elements of nutritive matter. It is easy to see that in this conception the ..chemical elements" and the ..elements of nutritive matter" were not the same substances. Sniadecki reserved the term "chemical element" for such basic chemical substances as carbon, sulphur, phosphor, while he applied the term "organic element" to the most basic organic combinations such as protein jelly, fibre, glue, fat etc. He also introduced the notion of "physiological element", which he used to describe the most basic organized parts of living matter. Physiology There can be no doubt that vitalist views, more or less similar to the views propounded by Sniadecki, had a great impact on the understanding and methodology of studies of phenomena involved in the formation and transformations of substances that occur in the world of animate nature. Vitalist positions could give rise to only one, unfailing, way of gaining knowledge of these phenomena - in vivo observation. Hence the interest shown in anatomy and physiology. For many decades organic chemistry was pursued as a branch of plant and animal physiology. The in vivo method of investigating chemical processes, used above all in experiments on animals, resulted in a vast amount of writings on such topics as respiration, alimentation and metabolism, and the structure of the separate component parts of living organisms. In his foreword to the first edition of Organic Chemistry, written in April 1842, Justus Liebig contented that "there can be no dependence between experience gained in inorganic chemistry, the knowledge of the behaviour of single substances and their compounds obtained in laboratories, and the living animal body and the behaviour of its component parts."

7 Ten years later, in his New Letters on Chemistry, he corrected his views, trying to retreat from his earlier vitalism. However he was quite inconsistent in doing that. He still maintained that the notion of „vital force" did not refer to any concrete kind of force, as was the case for electricity or magnetism; instead it was a description of a complex of factors on which the phenomena of life were dependent. The vital force was for animate matter what affinity was for inanimate. Liebig's inconsistency is revealed especially in Letter 29, where he wrote: "For if we believe that the forces of inorganic nature are the same as those of organic nature, then by necessity we are accepting that all