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cultural chemistry that it would be folly not to believe in similar 

 developments in the future. To give only one problem illustra- 

 ing the point: it is well known that by ordinary combustion 

 we use only a small fraction of the fuel value, of the energy, 

 in our coal, say 10 to 17% of it, wasting no less than 

 80 to 90% of this, our most precious source of wealth. The 

 electrical oxidation of coal ought to reduce this loss to a small 

 figure, and with one stroke thus treble or quadruple the economic 

 value of our great coal deposits ; pure chemistry has indi- 

 cated such a possibility and it is a question who will overcome the 

 inherent mechanical difficulties first, the worker in the field of 

 applied or of pure chemistry. 



In the second place, the professor of chemistry, whose life 

 is devoted to research as an article of faith rather than for 

 utilitarian results, is an ultimate, unprejudiced court of ap- 

 peal to which the public can resort in questions of gieat prac- 

 tical moment to its welfare. The best precedents of the past 

 generations then rather rare, that university and college 

 chemists hold themselves aloof from every kind of technical 

 and commercial obligations and entanglements, is in our gen- 

 eration becoming the rule, rather than the exception ; but these 

 same men, who refuse tempting offers from private corporations 

 as a matter of principle, are, also as a matter of principle, avail- 

 able for active service in the practical interests of the public. 

 In the third place — and this is a main object in my argument 

 — I trust that the future development of schools of applied chem- 

 istry in his country will be altogether along the lines of 

 graduate schools of technology, schools which will prepare the 

 technical chemist for investigation, train him to find possibili- 

 ties of improvement, of development, even of revolutionizing 

 the methods of work in his own fields, train him to test his 

 reasoning closely by the result of experimentation. For such 

 results the schools must not only give instruction in the techni- 

 cal methods of the day and a bare outline of general and theo- 

 retical chemistry, say in fields where they have already been 

 applied in technical work but they must give in particular the 

 broadest and most thorough instruction in the purest type of 



