826 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Europeans or essays in wliicli the imaginative faculty was given 

 free play, it being far easier to indulge in speculations than to 

 discover new facts. 



In the early struggles of a country to secure a place among 

 nations few men of ability can devote their energies to the pursuit 

 of science for science's sake. The environment is more favorable 

 to development of the inventive faculty than of the peculiar tal- 

 ent for conducting abstruse researches in an exact science. Add 

 to this the limited facilities for acquiring chemical knowledge in 

 the New World and the distance of amateurs from the European 

 head centers of learning, and it is certainly noteworthy that 

 American chemists combined to form associations for mutual im- 

 provement and the advancement of their calling at so early a 

 period. 



A fourth attempt to establish a chemical society was made at 

 New York city in 1876. The organization was at first somewhat 

 restricted in its plan, but in 1893 a change in its constitution was 

 effected which broadened its scope, and it now forms a strong, 

 influential, and truly national society. Its nine hundred and 

 eighty-four members, working in nine chartered sections, repre- 

 sent forty-seven States and Territories, besides several countries 

 of Europe, South America, and distant Australia. Its Journal, 

 comprising eleven hundred and fifty pages annually, is an au- 

 thoritative medium for the preservation and diffusion of the re- 

 searches made in the United States, and its annual meetings, held 

 in diverse localities, strengthen the bonds which unite its members 

 in good-fellowship and in the pursuit of their common profession. 



The recent publication of Mr. H. W. Seager's book, Natural History in 

 Shakespeare's Time, has incidentally made it evident that our master poet 

 was great in this as in all other fields, and that his allusions to animal life 

 and habits are not based on the fables in which his contemporaries indulged 

 even when writing seriously on the things of Nature, but on his own or 

 other accurate observations. Of such are his allusions to the quick breath- 

 ing of the captured sparrow, to the fast work underground of the mole, to 

 the wounded duck hiding among the sedges, to the scattering of the wild 

 geese at the firing of the fowler's gun, and his lamentation over the killing 

 of a fly by Marcus. An English reviewer of the book well says that "the 

 truth is that Shakespeare's natural histoiy is modern in its vividness, its 

 good sense, its sympathy. It is more profitable to compare his bird lore 

 with Gilbert White's than with anything in Bartholomew; more just to set 

 his animals against Buffon's than the grotesque 'four-footed beasts ' of Top- 

 sell ; more useful to verify his botany by Sowerby than by Gerarde or John 

 Parkinson. Modern naturalists and Nature-lovers have not been slow to 

 claim Shakespeare as their brother." Yet his characters sometimes bring 

 in the natural-history fables of the time. They would not be true to what 

 he intended to make them appear if they knew better. 



