250 THE AMERICAN CHP:MIST. 



the act of 1802, aud the uo less generous provision made by some of 

 the States themselves, a very laro-e amount of work has been done. 

 So close are the relations of chemistry to agriculture, that the opening 

 and liberal equipment of a chemical laboratory for special work was 

 among the first steps taken, on the establishment of each agricultural 

 experiment station under this grant; thus at present a chemist, with 

 often one or more assistants, is exclusively engaged in each State in 

 agricultural chendcal investigation. Under the liberal appro^triation 

 made also by the Department of Agriculture for chemical investigation, 

 more liberal than by any other Government, a large amount of valuable 

 work has been done at Washington. In the outcome of these various 

 provisions may be included Atwater's papers on the sources of the 

 nitrogenous food of the plant, Kichardson's on the composition of 

 American cereal grains, the work of Jordan, Armsby, and their asso. 

 ciates on tlie digestibility and feeding value of fodder materials, and 

 Hilgard's continuation of his work on soil analysis. Many papers were 

 published on improvements in methods of agricultural chemical analy 

 sis, and a very large amount of routine work was done in theexamina- 

 ation of commercial fertilizers for tlie purpose of protecting the con- 

 sumers from fraud. In all this a prominent part was taken also in this 

 decade by Johnson, Goessman, Jenkins, Ilabcock, Osborne, and others. 



Thus my history closes; a hurried one, and therefore imperfect, but 

 nevertheless giving, I trust, something of an idea of what we have 

 come to in this country, from very small beginnings. From about 

 eighty papers in the twenties, the first decade in which any work of 

 importance was done, to over nine hundred in the eighties is great 

 progress: and the progress justly appears greater, when the character 

 of the work is also taken into account. In the twenties the papers 

 were mostly about the analysis of minerals, or new forms of apparatus 

 or new reagents — and mostly very short papers — and in general much 

 below the grade of work that was going on in Europe; in the eighties 

 the work was on the same lines and of the same order as that done 

 elsewhere, and as well as that, rich in imp!)rtant results. 



But there is room for further progress still, much of it, before we in 

 this country shall accomplish as nuich as our brother chemists do in 

 Europe, — before our Chemical Society shall, if it publishes a journal, be 

 able to send out annually such a volume as the Berlin Society does, to 

 say nothing of what appears in other German periodicals. 



What are our prospects, and M'hat our means for doing this? This 

 kind of work is done at the universities of Germany and her technical 

 schools. We have universities; more of them, so-called, than Ger- 

 many has; we have a few technical schools of a high order, and innu- 

 merable colleges. These universities and technical schools have their 

 chemical laboratories, as have also many of the colleges. Every State 

 has its agricultural experiment station, with a working chemical lab- 

 oratory. So far then, as concerns laboratories, and men in charge of 



