April, 1916] American Chemist and the War's Problems 229 



of the past two years to affect this regard for such individuals. 

 Everyone of us knows Germans who are the most whole-souled 

 and kindly men — who we are grateful to know and who scorn 

 to be guilty of, or take advantage of, such chauvinism. Such 

 depreciations of American efforts will bury themselves, without 

 any assistance from us, and I only emphasize them here to call 

 the attention of teachers of chemistry to the fact that we owe 

 protection to the business community and the public against 

 such misrepresentation. We should never cease our appre- 

 ciation of foreign chemists of whatever nation, but in addition 

 it is our duty first to inform ourselves and then our students 

 upon what our own chemists have done to solve our problems 

 in this country. We have been able to blame our shirking this 

 duty in the past upon the fact that it was easy to get informa- 

 tion about foreign chemical achievement and no one seemed 

 anxious to give publicity to American development. We as 

 teachers have certainly done little to remedy this condition. 

 The American Chemical Society, however, has spread the 

 results of American effort before us and made them accessible 

 in its Journal of Industrial and Engineering Chemistry for the 

 last two years, in the shape of a series of addresses on the 

 chemist's contributions to American industries. There are 

 other addresses in these same volumes profoundly informing 

 along these lines and this is particularly true of the Perkin 

 Medal addresses each year in the same journal. In addition. 

 Professor S. P. Sadtler in the American Journal of Pharmacy 

 for October, 1915 (an address before the National Exposition of 

 Chemical Industries), in giving popular information along this 

 line limits himself entirely to chemical industries originated as 

 well as developed by American chemist and Edgar F. Smith's 

 History of Chemistry in America, but recently issued, should 

 be read by every student of chemistry. 



None of this work is in any sense a vain glorious adulation of 

 the chemist as some super-being nor is it an attempt to compete 

 in the questionable game of lauding one nationality above 

 another. It is merely a matter of a belated form of education 

 which our universities and chemists hitherto have largely 

 denied to the American business man, and which he has a right 

 to expect of them. The record is one for which we have good 

 reason to be thankful and, as we teachers no longer have the 



