TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OF CHEMICAL INVESTIGA- 

 TION IN THE CAPE COLONY. 



By Charles Frederick Juritz, M.A., D.Sc, F.I.C. 



Some people, seeing the title of this paper, may possibly 

 enquire with surprise whether there has been any chemical in- 

 vestigation at all in South Africa during past years. After a 

 long time spent in pursuing the purely practical, it almost seems 

 as if the pendulum is now swinging to the other side, and on all 

 hands a cry is arising for more research and more investigation . 

 Do we, when making such demands, always understand what 

 we mean? Are the expressions that rise to our lips not often 

 merely catch-words? Is the return of the pendulum a reality, 

 or is it merely an illusion? Or is the illusion ours when we — 

 the workers of the past — imagine that there has been some value 

 in the work that has occupied our minds and hands these last 

 twenty years? Have we — as a people — really ceased to concen- 

 trate all our thoughts on the purely practical, or is this cry 

 for research after all nothing more than the seeking for some 

 short-cut to "practical" results? If the latter 'be the case — 

 and I fear that too often it is — then we are really no wiser now 

 than when we took no account whatever of research or investiga- 

 tion. If, then, we are under a delusion, it is time that we take 

 thought, lest, awakening to a dawning sensation that we have 

 not heen going along right lines in the past, we may uncon- 

 sciously head off in a different direction, imagining that uotcv 

 at all events, we are on the right course. This, I think, is the 

 serious danger that faces us at present. 



As much as anyone, and perhaps more than most, the 

 writer has, during the last quarter century, repeatedly urged the 

 need of chemical investigation, and contrasted research and in- 

 vestigation with the short-sighted policy that finds no value in 

 anything that is not immediately practical. In the present ten- 

 dency, however, I cannot discover any inclination to recognise 

 that the path of unfettered research is in the end surest and 

 safest; the "practical" is still the fetish which we adore, and 

 while we surrender ourselves to the guidance of a pseudo- 

 investigation, we do so only because we have a vague fancy that 

 we will thus be carried to our " practical " goal by the speediest 

 way. Even then we like to retain sufficient control to afford 

 ourselves the liberty of using the goad should the pace not be 

 swift enough to please us. 



That, to my mind, is far from the ideal that underlies in- 

 vestigation. If there is to be any surrender to the leading of 

 research, it must he unconditioned. 



Furthermore, to direct a scientist that he must go and make 

 a discovery in a certain direction, and to demand from him, at 

 the end of a specified period, why the discovery is not forth- 

 coming, may be an indication that one's ideas of the methods 

 and possibilities of science do not even attain to the level of 

 those of the Shah who wished King Edward to execute the 



