A Correlation of Some Terms Used in Theoretical Inorganic and Organic Chemistry

Abstract

On the momentous occasion, in 1834, of the reading of Dumas' paper on substitution before the Academy of Sciences at Paris, the opening guns were fired in a long and bitter struggle between Berzelius, on the one hand, and the French school, headed by Laurent and Dumas, on the other. This extended argument marked the parting of the ways for inorganic and organic chemistry. Inorganic chemistry continued to use and to develop the electrochemical theory; organic chemists, however, abandoned the electrochemical theory almost entirely and contented themselves with the development and application of structural theory. There is admittedly some basis for this divorce of inorganic and organic chemistry. Whereas a great many of the reactions encountered in inorganic chemistry are ionic in character, relatively few organic molecules are ionized in solution. In organic reactions ions are postulated as existing, if at all, only as unstable and transient intermediates. With the development of the modern electronic theory, however, and its application to organic chemistry, it has become apparent that this separation is more superficial than real. Although organic molecules are not ordinarily ionized, nevertheless they are thought to be activated by the development, either permanently or incipiently, of positive and negative centers within the molecule, and a vast majority of organic reactions are initiated by the attack of the positive center of one molecule upon the negative center of another. Consequently, similar electrochemical concepts actually underlie both theoretical inorganic and organic chemistry. As a result of the separate development of these two divisions, however, the science has become cluttered with a dual system of nomenclature so that two completely unrelated, if not conflicting, sets of terms are often employed to describe similar or identical theoretical concepts or principles. The result is that the student of organic chemistry is compelled to learn a completely new and unfamiliar set of names for an old and familiar set of ideas. It is the purpose of this paper to correlate certain similar concepts of in-