Prof. Stanislao Cannizzaro

Abstract

BY the death of Cannizzaro, another link between the chemistry of to-day and that of the mid-Victorian era has been broken-a link which perhaps more than any other served to connect two well-defined and sharply differentiated epochs in the history of nineteenth-century chemistry. Cannizzaro was not a great discoverer in the ordinary sense of that word; the number of his published researches is few, and the field of inquiry he cultivated comparatively restricted. His greatest discovery, indeed, was his own countryman, Amedeo Avogadro. The fundamental conception of Avogadro that the gaseous laws of chemical combination—the laws associated with the nam.es of Dalton and Gay-Lussac—could be explained by the simple hypothesis that equal volumes of gases, under identical conditions of temperature and pressure, contain the same number of molecules was as the seed which fell upon stony ground. Even the efforts of Ampère—a man of far more influence in his generation-to cause it to fructify had no immediate effect. Berzelius, for a time, dimly apprehended the potentiality of the supposition, but he eventually lost his way under the blind guidance of dualism, and led Europe wrong for a quarter of a century. The German school, it is true, mainly under the direction of Gmelin, gradually shook itself free from dualism, but it wandered still further from the true faith, and by the middle of the nineteenth century chemical theory was utterly befogged, and its doctrine bristled with inconsistencies, contradictions, and anomalies.