The fact is the physical chemists never use their eyes and are most lamentably lacking in chemical culture. It is essential to cast out from our midst, root and branch, this physical element and return to our laboratories.
Henry Edward ArmstrongThat henceforth the absurd game of chemical noughts and crosses be tabu within the Society's precincts and that, following the practice of the Press in ending a correspondence, it be an instruction to the officers to give notice "That no further contributions to the mysteries of Polarity will be received, considered or printed by the Society." His challenge was not accepted.
Henry Edward ArmstrongAfter all, we scientific workers ... like women, are the victims of fashion: at one time we wear dissociated ions, at another electrons; and we are always loth to don rational clothing; some fixed belief we must have manufactured for us: we are high or low church, of this or that degree of nonconformity, according to the school in which we are brought up-but the agnostic is always rare of us and of late years the critic has been taboo.
Henry Edward Armstrong[Professor Bragg asserts that] In sodium chloride there appear to be no molecules represented by NaCl. The equality in number of sodium and chlorine atoms is arrived at by a chess-board pattern of these atoms; it is a result of geometry and not of a pairing-off of the atoms.
Henry Edward ArmstrongMany will, no doubt, prefer to retain old unsystematic names as far as possible, but it is easy to see that the desire to avoid change may carry us too far in this direction; it will undoubtedly be very inconvenient to the present generation of chemists to abandon familiar and cherished names, but nevertheless it may be a wise course to boldly face the difficulty, rather than inflict on coming generations a partially illogical and unsystematic nomenclature.
Henry Edward ArmstrongI notice that, in the lecture โฆ which Prof. Lowry gave recently, in Paris โฆ he brought forward certain freak formulae for tartaric acid, in which hydrogen figures as bigamist โฆ I may say, he but follows the loose example set by certain Uesanians, especially one G. N. Lewis, a Californian thermodynamiter, who has chosen to disregard the fundamental canons of chemistryโfor no obvious reason other than that of indulging in premature speculation upon electrons as the cause of valency
Henry Edward Armstrong