560 Professor George Lunge [March 15, 



This splendid achievement Great Britain owes, in the first place, to 

 the energy, business capacity and general practical ability of her sons ; 

 and, in the second place, to her very much greater freedom from the 

 leading-strings of government, in comparison with Continental states ; 

 but, thirdly, also to the special talent possessed by many Britons in the 

 mechanical direction, to their aptitude for seizing the essence of any 

 machinery, and to their genius for inventing new mechanical contri- 

 vances and adapting them for purposes of manufacturing and loco- 

 motion. The nation to which mankind owes the inventions of the 

 steam-engine, of railways and steam-boats, and the displacement of 

 manual labour by machinery in spinning and weaving, and countless 

 other industries, such as the substitution of the Bessemer process for 

 hand-made wrought-iron, this same nation has, up to the third quarter 

 of last century, also manifested the greatest progress in applied 

 chemistry. The British manufacturer, although in those times he 

 had frequently not studied the science of chemistry, as such, has 

 nevertheless always shown special aptitude for creating, so to say, 

 intuitively, the most suitable apparatus for operating chemical pro- 

 cesses, the principle of which may have been discovered elsewhere. 



In this manner inorganic chemical industry was developed in 

 Great Britain up to the middle of last century to a greater extent 

 than in any other country, by men like the Muspratts, Tennant, 

 Gossage, Dunlop, Chance, and many others. Most of them were 

 neither studied chemists nor engineers, but in their school any 

 theoretically educated chemist could immensely profit for the work of 

 factory-manager. 



In close connection with this state of matters we find in England 

 among the greatest inventors men who, at the outset, did not even 

 possess a routine knowledge of the field in which they achieved their 

 later successes, and who were altogether " outside the profession." 

 AYalter Weldon, the reformer of the industry of chlorine, was a 

 journalist of high literary culture, but originally of a very slight 

 amateur knowledge of chemistry, and not at all acquainted with 

 practical manufacturing. Henry Bessemer was a brass-founder who, 

 during the earlier part of his life, had nothing to do with iron. 

 Sidney Gilchrist Thomas was a clerk in the War Department, who 

 had never seen an ironworks when he made his epoch-making 

 invention, and who had acquired his knowledge of chemistry and 

 metallurgy in his spare time after office hours, which most of his 

 colleagues in England spend in the pursuit of sport, and many of his 

 Continental colleagues in the beer-house or the wine-tavern. 



Peculiar to England is also the following case, very different from 

 those just quoted, but also illustrative of the ways of British 

 inventors. William Henry Perkin, whose jubilee was celebrated last 

 year amid the concourse of all civilised nations, had, at the early age 

 of sixteen, entered Hofmann's laboratory in London. Already, two 

 years afterwards, whilst working at the synthesis of quinine (a task 



