oT 
We are not as yet in this covintry producing ott proper share of 
scholars of the first rank. The reasons for this are many, including hasty 
preparation, premature specialization, inswhcient rewards, and untavyvor- 
able environment. 
As to preparation, those of us who centemplate academic careers are 
usualiy unwilling to invest suflicient capital of time and money; we ex- 
pect to complete our scholastic education if uninterrupted at about twenty- 
five years of age and then enter upon an active career in which there is 
little time or opportunity for research or even yery serious or intensive 
study, for the sake of the immediate pecuniary reward; in Europe. 
several more years are spent in subordimate positions as investigators, on 
a semi-independent basis both scholastically and financially. The Huro- 
pean makes a larger investment and reaps a larger ultimate reward, not 
(nly in money but stili more in the censideration accorded to intellectual 
eminence. 
Concerning too early specialization and its shallow results, I shall 
speak late; let it suffice here to say that, for example, he is a poor 
chemist who is only a chemist. 
The rewards at present offered for pure scientific work in this country 
are insufficient to attract the most vigorous, capable and ambitious men: 
not only, nor chiefly, are the financial returns here less than in Europe, 
in spite of our higher cost of living, but the public respect for intellectual 
distinction is far inferior in this country, on account of our commercialism 
and our acceptance of wealth as our standard evidence of merit. 
The environment, too, is less favorable te the highest scientific work 
in that the numbers of those engaged therein are so few, and the national 
characteristic of haste rather than thoroughness peryades our activity. 
The value of real scientific attainment is still but dimly recognized by the 
industrial world; chemists are employed like clerks, without graduate 
training, and work like day laborers, but for less pay, at routine analysis, 
with neither the training nor the opportunity to attack the larger prob- 
lems in a fundamental scientific way. Such chemists are not on the same 
plane as the higher chemists in the German manufacturing industries, who 
have supervision of the works as well as the laboratories. One result. 
then, of this lack of demand for highly trained men is the small number 
pursuing research in our universities, so that even our best qualified pro- 
fessors have a mere handful of research students. and many of these can 
