n Faraday showed
the definite connection between the amount of electricity employed and
the amount of decomposition produced in the so-called electrolyte. But
its claims were really much too comprehensive, as subsequent discoveries
proved.

ORGANIC CHEMISTRY AND THE IDEA OF THE MOLECULE

When Berzelius first promulgated his binary theory he was careful to
restrict its unmodified application to the compounds of the inorganic
world. At that time, and for a long time thereafter, it was supposed
that substances of organic nature had some properties that kept them
aloof from the domain of inorganic chemistry. It was little doubted
that a so-called "vital force" operated here, replacing or modifying the
action of ordinary "chemical affinity." It was, indeed, admitted that
organic compounds are composed of familiar elements--chiefly carbon,
oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen; but these elements were supposed to
be united in ways that could not be imitated in the domain of the
non-living. It was regarded almost as an axiom of chemistry that
no organic compound whatever could be put together from its
elements--synthesized--in the laboratory. To effect the synthesis of
even the simplest organic compound, it was thought that the "vital
force" must be in operation.

Therefore a veritable sensation was created in the chemical world
when, in the year 1828, it was announced that the young German chemist,
Friedrich Wohler, formerly pupil of Berzelius, and already known as a
coming master, had actually synthesized the well-known organic product
urea in his laboratory at Sacrow. The "exception which proves the rule"
is something never heard of in the domain of logical science. Natural
law knows no exceptions. So the synthesis of a single organic compound
sufficed at a blow to break down the chemical barrier which the
imagination of the fathers of the science had erected between animate
and inanimate nature. Thenceforth the philosophical chemist would
regard the plant and animal organisms as chemical laboratories in which
conditions are peculiarly favorable for building up complex compounds of
a few familiar elements, under the operation of universal chemical laws.
The chimera "vital force" could no longer gain recognition in the domain
of chemistry.

Now a wave of interest in organic chemistry swept over the chemical
world, and soon the study of carbon compounds became as much the fashion
as electrochemistry had been in the, preceding