TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OF CHEMICAL INVESTIGATION. 93 



Astronomer Royal because he had no solar eclipse handy at the 

 time when His Oriental Majesty happened to visit the Obser- 

 vatory. We cannot make scientific discoveries to order, and, if 

 we appoint individuals or establish institutions with such an 

 object in view, our hopes are doomed to extinction. The only 

 way to proceed is to subject Nature to cross-examination by ex- 

 periment and counter-experiment. Thus, and thus alone, shall 

 we be able to elicit anything of value. How these questions are 

 to be put to Nature is a matter best left to counsel, and if the 

 client interferes with, or limits his adviser's discretion in this 

 respect, he risks losing his case and the costs as well. Most 

 scientific discoveries — 1 am speaking now of those with an ob- 

 vious practical bearing — are made, as it were, by accident: the 

 investigator pursues the even tenor of his way, and in the course 

 of his journey the discoveries, one might almost say, just happen. 

 The last expression does not exactly fit, for the scientific mind 

 miust be on the qui vive for such " happenings," but my point is 

 that they come along the level of the pathway, and are not 

 just swooped down upon as the prey is by the eagle. 



When in the past I have lamented the lack of chemical in- 

 vesti;gation, it has not been with the idea, which some seem to 

 have to-day, that eagle-flights ought of necessity to replace the 

 steady pursuit of a terrestrial pathway if we are to make satis- 

 factory progress. My complaint has rather been that the path 

 has been hemmed in and fenced, that barbed wires and obstacles 

 of other kinds 'have hindered advance. We shall be making a 

 sad mistake if we think that the proper way to pursue hence- 

 forward is to leave all the tangle and obstruction where it is 

 and to betake ourselves to wings. Our failure will then be 

 sorrier than ever before. 



We read in history that when the Israelites emerged trium- 

 phant from the shackles of Egypt, a " mixed multitude " at once 

 ex'hi'bited parasitic tendencies toward the freed tribes ; but it 

 was not long ere those unrestrained camp-followers proved a 

 thorn in the side of the new nation on its way to the Land of 

 Promise. If we have indeed shaken off the ultra-utilitarian fet- 

 ters by which we have hitherto been bourjd, our path through 

 the wilderness will be anything but pleasurable unless the eggings 

 on of those who are ti'ith us but. not of us can be restrained. 

 As Professor Meldola said in his Presidential Address to the 

 Chemical Society (London) four years ago*, it is "the steady 

 plodding work which culminates in great discoveries." 



Now I am happy to say that during the last quarter of a 

 century there has been done, under exceedingly narrowing cir- 

 cumstances, a relatively large amount of just this " steady plod- 

 ding work " in my own particular science, and for the most 

 part it has also ibeen, as Professor Meldola went on to say, 

 " quite unheeded by the general public." As for the institution 

 over which I have the privilege of presiding during twenty years. 

 the Cape Government Laboratories, I have freely admitted that 



* " Trans. Chem. Soc-,"' vol. xci, p- 628. 



