PRESIDENT S ADDRESS. 7 



British chemists believe that if their Government had h'stened to them 

 years ago the Germans would have been beaten in the early 

 stages of the great war, and that thousands of lives would have been 

 saved, [and that] in the autumn of 1914 Germany was saved from a 

 crushing defeat because she possessed the sense to encourage her 

 chemists. 



We may. however, candidly admit that the Anglo-Saxon pub- 

 lic has gone some distance in the direction of learning wisdom 

 during these four years. An American chemist was delivering a 

 presidential address to an academy of science on the evening of 

 the day on which President Wilson .signed the Declaration of 

 War, and he said that 



probably the greatest contribution to science of the present war is the 

 awakening of the average mind to the power and value to mankind of that 

 group of phenomena which we study as chemistry. This is probably 

 because we most easily grasp and appreciate applications rather than 

 generalisations, and the use of chemistry in war has been a revelation to 

 the general puljlic. 



My predecessor of three years ago, in a paper read by him 

 at our Stellenbosch meeting last year, urged that " each State 

 must be organised for efficiency." If that be aimed at, then the 

 principle " Every man in the post that fits him best " will have 

 to become one of the guiding principles of organisation, as it 

 has done in the United States. The Western Allies were slow 

 to realise the need of applying this principle, at all events as 

 far as scientific qualifications were concerned, but they have 

 begun to see it now. In the " Report on the War Service for 

 Chemists " to the Council of National Defence of the United 

 States, it was stated that 



Eingland, France, and Italy found it necessary to recall all chemists from 

 the ranks ; Canada does not allow chemists to enlist ; chemists have saved 

 Germany up to the present time. 



Prof. Camille Matignon, writing in the Revue Gencrale dcs 

 Sciences in January, 191 7, explains how this salvation was 

 brought to pass. Germany would surely have been faced with 

 disaster at the commencement of the present war had she not 

 devised means of providing herself with a sufficiency of nitrates. 

 These were absolutely essential for the production of explosives, 

 and the outside supply being cut off, Germany could only be 

 saved if the problem of converting ammonium sulphate into 

 nitrates on a large scale could be solved. How this was done is 

 too long a story to tell here ; suffice it to say that by encouraging 

 people to use gas and coke instead of coal a large annual output 

 of ammonium sulphate was secured, and by the end of 191 5 the 

 Anhaltische Maschinenbau Gesellschaft of Berlin had established 

 30 installations for the conversion of this into nitric acid at the 

 rate of 100,000 tons per month by means of a process newly 

 worked out by Frank and Caro. A factory employing Pauling's 

 process for the preparation of nitric acid from atmospheric nitro- 

 gen was established in Saxony, and a third method — the direct 

 synthesis of ammonia — was subsidised by the German Govern- 

 ment after the Battle of the Marne, so as to increase its annual 

 production to 300,000 tons of ammonium sulphate. 



