A System of Volumetric Analysis

Abstract

THERE is no question that volumetric analysis does not yet play that important part in quantitative chemical analysis which it merits, and which on the appearance of Mohr's well-known “Titrirmethode” it was confidently anticipated that it would assume. The method of instruction commonly pursued in many of our large public laboratories is in a great measure to be blamed for this result. It is, of course, necessary that the student should be put through a thorough course of gravimetric analysis, in order that he may attain that manipulative dexterity without which he cannot hope to become a successful operator, and perhaps no branch of practical chemistry is better calculated to afford the requisite training and practice than the somewhat tedious process of weight analysis, with its innumerable separations, filtrations, washings, and weighings. But however excellent may be their educational value, and however accurate their results, there is no doubt that many of the gravimetric methods at present in common use when viewed as practical processes for every-day application, fall very far short of what is required of them. It not unfrequently happens that the busy chemist, uncertain whether a lengthy analysis will afford him, after all, the requisite information, hesitates to incur what he fears may turn out to be a useless sacrifice of valuable time, and hence, from the want of rapid and sufficiently accurate analytical methods, many weighty facts may have been, doubtless actually have been, overlooked. Indeed, it is a question whether some of these analytical processes have not done as much to retard the progress of chemical science as to advance it. The majority of chemical workers, especially those engaged in scientific research, have not made analysis a special study, and hence when they are under the necessity of making a particular determination, they are content with the time-honoured processes which they have learned in the course of their laboratory-training. It is only by the appearance of such works as the one before us that the greater number of chemists are made aware of the advances which quantitative chemistry has really made.

A System of Volumetric Analysis.

By Dr. Emil Fleischer. Translated by M. M. Pattison Muir, F.R.S.E. (Macmillan and Co., 1877.)