Abstract

IT may not be wholly without interest to some of the readers of NATURE to be made acquainted with an analogy that has recently forcibly impressed me between branches of human knowledge apparently so dissimilar as modern chemistry and modern algebra. I have found it of g reat utility in explaining to non-mathematicians the nature of the investigations which algebraists are at present busily at work upon to make out the so-called Grundformen or irreducible forms appurtenant to binary quantics taken singly or in systems, and I have also found that it may be used as an instrument of investigation in purely algebraical inquiries. So much is this the case that I hardly ever take up Dr. Frankland’s exceedingly valuable “Notes for Chemical Students,” which are drawn up exclusively on the basis of Kekule’s exquisite conception of valence, without deriving suggestions for new researches in the theory of algebraical forms. I will confine myself to a statement of the grounds of the analogy, referring those who may feel an interest in the subject and are desirous for further information about it to a memoir which I have written upon it for the new American Journal of Pure and Applied Mathematics, the first number of which will appear early in February.