An Unorthodox Chemistry

Abstract

PROF. KENRICK disarms criticism of this remarkable book by his statement in the preface that it “will not be found to be a ‘teachable’ book”, but immediately throws down the gauntlet by continuing: “a teachable book must be a learnable book, and that is a most dangerous educational weapon”. Such provocation in the preface whets our curiosity as to the text, but before we reach the latter we are ‘brought up short’ again by the table of contents. Chap, i begins with the manufacture of salt, and, after a chapter on ‘composition’, two chapters are devoted to the refining of crude sugar and various chemical phenomena that the process involves. Chap, xii is entitled “Wood”, chap, xiii “The Mass Law, Esterification, Synthesis of Ammonia, Dissociation, Electrolytes”, chap, xiv “Air” and chap, xv “Rocks”. We are led to murmur, like Alice, “Curiouser and curiouser”, and to turn with now thoroughly stimulated eagerness to the body of the book. After the shocks we have already experienced, it is no surprise to find that Prof. Kenrick has certainly elaborated a unique method of approach to the study of chemistry. His first fifty pages are, in the main, devoted to a consideration of what chemists mean by the ‘composition’ of a substance; in the end, after what? seems to be a needlessly involved and verbose discussion, he arrives at the merely commonplace conclusion that the “composition of a material states a set of substances and their proportions which could be changed quantitatively into the material on the assumption that any actual transformation can be reversed”.

An Introduction to Chemistry.

By Prof. Frank B. Kenrick. Pp. viii + 434. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1933.) 3 dollars.