The Experimental Basis of Chemistry - Suggestions for a Series of Experiments Illustrative of the Fundamental Principles of Chemistry

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PREFACE IDA FREUND had been for many years before her death a naturalised British subject, but was Austrian by birth. Left an orphan while still quite young, she was brought up by her grandparents in Vienna, and received her early education at a Biirgerschule in that city. Afterwards she took the diploma of a State Training College for teachers, and the experience there gained in the study of continental methods broadened her outlook and was possibly the origin of the interest in the profession of teaching and sympathy with teachers which were to become marked characteristics of her later career. She then came to England to make her home with her uncle, the violinist Ludwig Straus, well known to music lovers as a member of the Joachim quartet. Her uncle sent her to Cambridge, where as a student of Girton College she took the complete honours course in Natural Sciences, and in 1886 was placed in the first class of the second part of the Natural Sciences Tripos for her knowledge of chemistry. In the following year she began her lifes work as a teacher at Newnham College where she laboured till her retirement in 1912. At that time women students were not admitted to the University Chemical Laboratory until they had passed Part I of the Tripos, and thus Miss Freund was entirely responsible forthe laboratory training of the majority of her students, many ofwhom came up to College with little or no knowledge of chemistry. Triumphing over disabilities due to physical infirmities and indifferent health such as would have daunted a less intrepid spirit, she devised and elaborated for her first year students a course of practical work supplemented by short lectures, demonstration experiments and discussions, and these form the basis on which this book rests. In 1904 she published a considerable work entitled The Study of Chemical Composition, which carried her influence as a teacher far beyond the limits of her own laboratory. The orderly arrangement of the book, the fulness of its historical references, and the quotations often of considerable length from the original papers in which the fundamental laws of chemistry were enunciated and established by their discoverers give it permanent value as a students sourcebook of chemical theory, and secured for it a favourable reception. This encouraged Miss Freund to attempt to bring to the notice of other teachers her views as to the manner in which students might be helped to realise that chemistry is a science based on experiment and that the logical interpretation of experiment leads directly to the generalisations known as the laws of chemistry. Miss Freund had a dread of thoughtless experimenting and slipshod thinking. She felt strongly that much that passes for training in science has little relation to scientific method and is of small educational value...