Cornish George A., Smith Arthur. Chemistry a Text-book for High Schools

Toronto: The Macmillan Company of Canada Limited, 1920. — 297 p.There are certain essential features that every elementary text-book in Chemistry should exhibit. The chief function of science, as a part of school education, is not to impart information, but to offer a training in the scientific method by which the mind works up the concrete facts of nature into generalizations. Hence a text-book should show how investigations are conducted; and, for this purpose, the method by which the process of combustion and the composition of air and of water were discovered are presented with some detail. An elementary text-book should also state some of the generalizations or laws of chemistry, as it is a knowledge of these that indicates clearly that chemistry is a science. Moreover, it is essential, in order that these laws should be properly understood, that a knowledge of important substances, their methods of preparation, and their properties should be stated, as it is only by means of such knowledge that the generalizations canbe approached. Side by side with the advance in the knowledge of the facts of chemistry has moved the development of chemical theories, and no adequate knowledge of the methods of chemistry could be presented without a statement of those theories that have had, and still possess, such potent influence on the advancement of the science. Chemical facts play so important a part in the industries and in the simple phenomena of daily life that it is necessary to show at every stage the application of the chemical laws to the explanation of these facts. The Great War has shown so forcibly the predominant importance of the technical applications of chemistry that this phase of the subject is bound hereafter to be more strongly emphasized in elementary text-books.