The Emergence of Structure Theory

It was not until the be nning of the nineteenth century that the first serious attempts were made to study the spatial arrangement of the atoms in molecnles. Picmeering w( rk in this area by Dalton and Wollaston led to a greatly improved understanding of the relationships between atoms in space and, incidentally, also gave rise to a new nomenclature for chemical 

Although Dalton had constructed many of the models now familiar 

The tetrahedral carbon atom model was used to great effect in 1874 independently by van t Hoff and Le Bel to interpret the isomerism extant in a wide range of organic species [27]. 

After the introduction of the tetrahedral carbon atom concept into organic chemistry, various polyhedral structures were postulated in the inorganic domain. Work in the field of coordination chemistry, which was devrioped virtually sin e haodedly by Werner [33], led to the idea that 

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