SCIENCE IN ITS USEFUL APPLICATIONS. 389 



professional services of a kind and extent that can not be rendered by 

 the parson, or the doctor, or the lawyer ; or yet by the amateur engi- 

 neer, or the amateur electrician, or the amateur chemist. It is the 

 competent services of professional men, specially trained in their sev- 

 eral departments, that are alone adequate, and are alone accordingly in 

 request. To the trained professional chemist, as to other professional 

 men, interests of occasionally enormous value are committed ; and 

 some notion of the consideration in which his work is held may be 

 gathered from the extensive resort had everywhere to his services, 

 even by the great departments of state and by the most renowned and 

 important of municipal and other corporations. 



Among Government Departments, the War Office, the Home 

 Office, the Board of Trade, the Local Government Board, and the 

 Board of Inland Revenue, have each their respective permanently at- 

 tached staffs of professional chemists, with whom from time to time, 

 in relation to special subjects of inquiry, other chemists of distinction 

 are associated. Among corporations and public institutions of all 

 sorts, the City of London, the Metropolitan Board of Works, most of 

 the great provincial Corporations and Local Boards, the Royal Mint, 

 the Houses of Parliament, the Elder Brethren of the Trinity House, 

 the Thames Conservancy, the Royal Agricultural Society, the great 

 Gas and Water Companies, the different Metropolitan Vestries and 

 Local Boards, and many more such bodies, have recourse alike to the 

 regular services of their permanently attached professional chemists, 

 and to the supplementary services of various others among us whom 

 they find it necessary to call into consultation from time to time. 

 And of yet greater extent as a whole is the habitual resort that is had 

 to the services of the professional chemists by mercantile and manu- 

 facturing firms and associations, engaged in almost every variety of 

 commerce, manufacture, and industrial enterprise. Alike, then, by 

 the great departments of state, and by commercial firms of world- 

 wide renown, and by traders and producers occupying a less distin- 

 guished position, the multifarious services of the chemist are ever in 

 request. And in respect to ourselves, by whom these services are 

 rendered, from those of us occupying the leading positions in the 

 profession, to the most humble individuals practicing in our ranks, 

 we are all associated in a common work, and have all a common credit 

 to maintain, and are all under mutual obligation to co-operate Avith 

 and advance the interests of one another. 



It would seem, however, from observations not unfrequently haz- 

 arded by some very superior persons, whose happy mission it is to put 

 the rest of the world to rights, that there is something derogatory to 

 the man of science in making his science subservient in any way to the 

 requirements of his fellows, and thereby contributory to his own means 

 for the support of himself and of those depending upon him. Now, 

 on this not uncommon cant of the day, a little plain speaking would 



