450 Professor Sir Henry E. Eoscoe [April 16, 



WEEKLY EVENING MEETING, 



Friday, April IG, 1886. 



Sir William Bowman, Bart. LL.D. F.R.S. Vice-President, in the 



Chair. 



Professor Sir Henry E. Eoscoe, M.P. LL.D. F.R.S. 



On Recent Progress in the Coal-tar Industry. 



Those who have read Goethe's episodes from his life, known as 

 ' Wahrheit und Dichtung,' will remember his description of his visit 

 in 1741 to the burning hill near Dutweiler, a village in the Palatinate. 

 Here he met old Stauf, a coal philosopher, 'pliiloso^phus per ignem, 

 whose peculiar appearance and more peculiar mode of life, Goethe 

 remarks upon. He was engaged in an unsavoury process of collecting 

 the oils, resin, and tar, obtained in the destructive distillation of 

 coal carried on in a rude form of coke oven. Nor were his labours 

 crowned with pecuniary success, for he comj)lained that he wished 

 to turn the oil and resin into account, and save the soot, on which 

 Goethe adds that in attempting to do too much, the enterprise alto- 

 gether failed. We can scarcely imagine, however, what Goethe's feel- 

 ings would have been could he have foreseen the beautiful and useful 

 products which the development of the science of a century and a half 

 has been able to extract from Stauf 's evil smelling oils. With what 

 wonder would he have regarded the synthetic power of modern 

 chemistry, if he could have learnt that not only the brightest, the 

 most varied colours of every tone and shade can be obtained from 

 this coal tar, but that some of the finest perfumes can, by the skill of 

 the chemist, be extracted from it. Nay, that from these apparently 

 useless oils, medicines which vie in potency with the rare vegeto- 

 alkaloids can be obtained, and lastly, perhaps most remarkable of 

 all, that the same raw material may be made to yield an innocuous 

 principle, termed saccharine, possessed of far greater sweetness than 

 sugar itself. The attainment of such results might well be regarded 

 as savouring of the chimerical dreams of the alchemist, rather than 

 expressions of sober truth, and the modern chemist may ask a riddle 

 more paradoxical than that of Samson, "Out of the burning came 

 forth coolness, and out of the strong came forth sweetness " ; and by 

 no one could the answer be given who had not ploughed with the 

 heifer of science, " What smells stronger than tar and what tastes 

 sweeter than saccharine ? " That these are matters of fact we may 

 assure ourselves by the most convincing of all proofs — their money 

 value, and we learn that the annual value of the products now ex- 

 tracted from an unsightly and apparently worthless material, amounts 



