A Primeval Forest of the Tropics

FIGURE 256. This beautiful hand-colored figure (see color plates) is from the 1857 edition of Edward Youmans Chemical Atlas (New York, first published in 1854). 

The confusion so evident in Youmans s book over formulas, atomic weights, isomers, and valence will all clear up within the following ten years or so. 

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In 1835 Friedrich Wohler called organic chemistry a primeval forest of the tropics (p. 422) and the metaphor, of an unimaginably complex living system, was seemingly an apt one. Organic compounds seemed to be isolable only from living creatures—plants and animals. Often, they had to be extracted from enormously complex matrices and were challenging to isolate pure. Even urine, a clear liquid. 

Organic chemistry just now is enough to drive one mad. It gives the impression of a primeval tropic forest, full of the most remarkable things, a monstrous and boundless thicket, with no way to escape, into which one may well dread to enter. ... 

Woehler, too, had forsaken his first love almost in its infancy. Organic chemistry nowadays almost drives me mad, he complained. To me it appears like a primeval tropical forest full of the most remarkable things, a dreadful endless jungle into which one does not dare enter, for there seems no way out. He went to his minerals again and to the study of metals. In Sweden he had watched the master Berzelius at work on his researches of silicon, selenium and zirconium—three new elements. Woehler had learned much during his short stay and, a year before his immortal synthesis of urea, had already accomplished a research of the first order—the isolation of the... 

Organic chemistry nowadays almost drives me mad. To me it appears like a primeval, tropical forest full of the most remarkable things, a dreadful endless jungle into which one does not dare enter for there seems to be no way out Friedrich Wohler (1800-1882)... 

Organic chemistry just now is enough to drive one mad. It gives one the impression of a primeval, tropical forest full... 

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