PREFACE
The time is, happily, past when ''Chemistry for Medical
Students," " Quantitative Analysis for Engineers" and similar
titles, indicating treatises on the spoon-feeding of special dishes
of easy chemical cookery to the classes of persons indicated, met
any very general demand on the part of teachers. Even in our
highly specialized chemical science of today and in its enormously
diversified applications io industrial and economic problems, we
recognize the futility of attempting to train students for technical
or professional careers by teaching them only the mechanical
notions and processes of chemistry without the scientific develop-
ment of fundamentals.
The authors have tried to keep this idea in view in the compila-
tion of this book. The discussion of special methods (largely
"official'/' wherever applicable) for the analysis of materials
of prime importance to chemical students of agricultural mate-
rials and of agricultural problems forms an important portion of
the book; but we subscribe very heartily to the belief that one
of the things most needed by scientific agriculture today is an
increasing body of agricultural chemists who understand the
importance of desiring to know why matters are thus and so.
The introductory course in general quantitative analysis, in
Part I, deals with a select list of such analytical processes as may
be considered useful for impressing upon the mind of the student
the principles of analytical work, as well as the importance of
exercising intelligence and care in all work of the laboratory.
Bearing in mincl the fact that in most college curricula this first
course must necessarily be brief, the typical classes of methods
for a given determination have been treated together. This, in
turn, has involved a preliminary discussion of materials and
methods of both gravimetric and volumetric analysis.
Part II, dealing with certain special measurements, has been
included in recognition of the fact that the highly important