About eight years ago, the catalytic carbonylation of organic nitro compounds was a research field developed enough to justify a rather long review on this subject. Now, we feel that the scientific results and new achievements in this field, very important even from an industrial point of view, require a book in order to be adequately presented. The competition between the catalytic carbonylation of organic nitro compounds and other chemical routes for the synthesis of a variety of organic compounds has not yet come to an end, but many progresses have been done in the former field. We also like to emphasize that this type of research does not only involve relevant industrial problems to be solved, but it opens a research field where the academic interests (mechanism of the reactions, isolation of the intermediates in the catalytic cycles, synthesis of model compounds and so on) can find a lot of opportunities.

The work described in this paper is a continuation of that started in this laboratory last year by James W. Ferguson (1). While the use of platinum oxide is only recent (since 1922 (2)) hydrogenation of a large number of nitro compounds using platinum black catalyst has been studied. It has been pointed out in Ferguson0́9s thesis (1) that a study of the hydrogenation of a compound containing both an aliphatic and an aromatic nitro group would be particularly informative. It was found necessary to synthesize such a compound as none available were suitable for the purpose. In this paper the reductions of nitromethane and of the compound made by Ferguson are described.