TWENTIETH CENTURY

The new century starts out strong: Behrens publishes his Mikrochemische Technik [Behrens, H. (1900)], and Huysse's beautiful Atlas is produced.

A.C. HUYSSE

Huysse was a military pharmacist in the Royal Netherlands Army.  1900 saw the publication of his Atlas zum Gebrauche bei der mikrochemischen Analyse [Huysse, A.C. (1900)] (Figure15).  It was written for chemists, pharmacists, geologists and metallurgists, and for university and technical school laboratories.  The beauty of this publication lies in the 27 chromolithographed plates, each illustrating six microchemical reactions (Figure 16); some are in black-and-white, but most are in color, even down to the variegated green interference colors in yellow lead iodide (Plate XIII).

A second edition [Huysse, A.C. (1932)], of this beautiful Atlas (Figure 17) was published in 1932, with the chromolithographs (Figure 18) now numbering 31.

click image to enlarge (134K) Figure 15. Title page of A.C. Huysse’s Atlas zum Gebrauch bei der mikrochemischen Analyse (1900).

click image to enlarge (130K) Figure 16. One of the 27 chromolithographed plates from A.C. Huysse’s Atlas zum Gebrauch bei der mikrochemischen Analyse (1900).

click image to enlarge (239K) Figure 17. Cover title of A.C. Huysse's Atlas zum Gebrauche bei der mikrochemischen Analyse (1932).

click image to enlarge (160K) Figure 18. One of the 31 chromolithographic plates illustrating microchemical reactions, from A.C. Huysse's Atlas zum Gebrauche bei der mikrochemischen Analyse (1932).

CARL G. HINRICHS

Gustavus Detlef Hinrichs was Professor of Chemistry in the Medical Department of St. Louis University.  In the first couple of years of the new century, he planned the publication of a work on microchemical analysis which would not require the use of hydrogen sulfide.  He requested his son, Carl Gustav, a chemistry instructor in the same medical department—in fact the youngest instructor—to work out such a course.  The resulting book, First Course in Microchemical Analysis [Hinrichs, Carl Gustav (1904)], was published in 1904, simultaneously in St. Louis, Missouri; New York and Leipzig; London; and in Paris.  It is a curious book.  The father wrote the introduction to crystallographic chemistry.  There is a Crystal Atlas, with plates of hand-drawn crystals, illustrations of microscopes and goniometers, two portraits, and several graphs.  Then there is an Atlas of Micro-crystals, carefully drawn, as they appeared in the field of a microscope; some are hand-drawn, others are taken from works of other authors.  The plates occupy 64 pages.  The father's introduction (pages 65-100) is followed by the son's course (pages 101-145).

Probably only those interested in the historical aspects of microchemistry will require this book.

N. SCHOORL (UTRECHT)

Schoorl's name comes up around the first decade of the century.  He published a number of articles on microchemical analysis in the years 1907-1909, which were collected together in book form as Beiträge zur mikrochemischen Analyse [Schoorl, N. (1909)].