Dittmar W. Exercises in Quantitative Chemical Analysis: With a Short Treatise on Gas Analysis

Glasgow: William Hodge & Co, 1887. — 345 p.A preliminary edition of this book, as many of my friends are aware, was issued a little over a year ago for the benefit of chiefly my own students. That edition, however, was little more than a reproduction of what had long had currency in my laboratory as a trypographed book. Hence this volume may be introduced as having already been used - and I hope not without success - in a largely-attended teaching laboratory for a series of years. However it may stand with analysis generally, quantitative analysis can be taught only by examples; and in the earlier stages of the course the technicalities of the subject are the principal things to be taught. Hence our exercises on " analytical methods" are arranged, not according to any scientific system, but so that, at any given point of his progress, the student has become familiar with as many different operations as could have been learned during the time. To some of my readers the tone of the earlier exercises more especially may savour a little of mechanical drilling. Why tell the student so minutely what he has to do and hinder him from exercising his own ingenuity? Some ten years ago, if a book like the present had been placed before me, I should have asked this question myself. But I have since come to modify my views. The technicalities of quantitative analysis are the very things which the student is not likely to find out by himself. He had - better be drilled into doing them correctly. What is the good, for instance, of letting him spoil a series of ammonia determinations by mismanaging his chloroplatinate precipitates? It surely is better to show him quite directly what he has to do; and if it is, why should not' the book tell him, and thus save the time of the teacher? No tear of any talented student being spoiled by a course of iudicious drilling. It is just he that mast be made alive to the tact that no amount of scientific knowledge will enable a man to get through a quantitative analysis successfully unless he has the canning as well as the knowing, and unless he attends to all those little practical details which to him at first Sight umy appear to be irrelevant. Cheerful and conscientious devotion to all the protracted drudgery that may be involved in one's duty is certainly a lesson worth learning, and it is one of the educational functions of quantitative analysis to inculcate the lesson. And as to the talented student's weaker brother? Why, he must be drilled, or else he may learn nothinsr at all. Of course, here, as everywhere, we must beware of extremes, and take care not to disgust the student with his work. It is as well, even at the earlier stages, to occasionally break the monotony of analytical work by the interpolation of an exercise in preparative chemistry. With students who have already been " broken in," a capital plan is to give them unnamed substances and let them find the exercise or set of exercises that they are meant to work, taking care not to give them any help except where it may become necessary to prevent sheer waste of time.