The Nature and Extent of Organic Chemistry

Organic chemistry is the chemistry of the compounds of carbon. It is a very great subject —over a million different organic compounds have already been reported and described in the chemical literature. Many of these substances have been isolated from living matter, and many more have been synthesized by chemists in the laboratory. 

The occurrence in nature, methods of preparation, composition, structure, properties, and uses of some organic compounds (hydrocarbons, alcohols, chlorine derivatives of hydrocarbons, and organic acids) were discussed in Chapters 7 and 8. This discussion is continued in the following sections, with emphasis on natural products, especially the valuable substances obtained from plants, and on synthetic substances useful to man. Several large parts of organic chemistry will not be discussed at all these include the methods of isolation and purification of naturally occurring compounds, the methods of analysis and determination of structure, and the methods of synthesis used in organic chemistry, except to the extent that they have been described in Chapters 7 and 8. 

There are two principal ways in which organic chemists work. One of these ways is to begin the investigation of some natural material, such as 

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