65 



the University of Heidelberg, investigator and author of a stand- 

 ard text-book on organic chemistry, became the head of a 

 great house at a salary said to be $25,000 a year. The enor- 

 mous, indirect consequences of van't Hoff's work in industrial 

 chemistry have already been referred to ; but he has also been 

 a most valued adviser of the great Stassfurt works in the ex- 

 ploitation of their salt deposits. The names of Perkins, Lie- 

 big, Pasteur, Liberman, Graebe, Tiemann, Moissan, Nernst, 

 Bredig, Haber and others too numerous to mention are current 

 in the texts of pure chemistry as well as in important chapters 

 of applied chemistry. And today, Nef's present researches on 

 the oxidation of sugars, carried out for the discovery of truth 

 only, may have extremely valuable results in their application 

 to the treatment of diabetes. 



I have purposely dwelt on this side of the question before 

 us, leading to the recognition of the very intimate, almost in- 

 extricable relations of pure and applied chemistry in their highest 

 forms of development, in order to express explicitly the be- 

 lief that the highest interests of chemistry, of our universities 

 and lower schools, and of our commercial and national develop- 

 ment, would be the better preserved, the clearer we are in our 

 own minds that sharp lines of division between pure and ap- 

 plied chemistry are unnatural, unnecessary and undesirable. I 

 have done this in order to present three conclusions as the logi- 

 cal outcome of such a point of view : In the first place, in this 

 practical, fast growing land of ours, in which the quest for 

 values that cannot be measured in dollars and cents, the quest 

 for truth and beauty, is just beginning to have a footing and 

 not too firm a one at that, it would be well for the irremedia- 

 bly practical man, if he must apply his own standard of meas- 

 urement, to remember that the discovery of new truth for its 

 own sake in the field of pure chemistry may well contain the 

 germs of revolutionary developments enhancing the wealth of 

 the nation in many directions ; it has been true so often in the 

 past in all sciences — as shown in the development of the 

 telegraph, the dynamo, the wireless, in the development of 

 modern methods in the steel, sugar, copper industries, in agri- 



