220 LIFE AND EXPERIENCES CHAP. 



in our country, the finished and valuable colours are 

 nearly all manufactured in Germany. The crude and 

 inexpensive materials are, therefore, exported by us 

 abroad, to be there converted into colours having many 

 hundred times the value ; and these expensive colours 

 have again to be bought by the English dyers and 

 calico-printers for use in our staple industries. The 

 total annual value of manufactured coal-tar colours 

 amounts to about three and a half millions ; and as 

 England herself, though furnishing the raw material, 

 makes only a small fraction of this quantity, but buys 

 a large fraction, it is clear that she loses the profit of 

 the manufacture. The causes of this fact, which we 

 must acknowledge, viz., that Germany has driven 

 England out of the field in this important branch of 

 chemical manufacture, are probably various. In the 

 first place, there is no doubt that much of the German 

 success is due to the long-continued attention which 

 their numerous Universities have paid to the cultivation 

 of organic chemistry as a pure science. For this is 

 carried out with a degree of completeness and to an 

 extent to which we in England are as yet strangers. 1 

 Secondly, much again is to be attributed to the far 

 more general recognition among German men of busi- 

 ness of the value, from a merely mercantile point of 

 view, of high scientific training. In proof of this, it 

 may be mentioned that the number of scientific 

 chemists employed at the colour works at Hochst is 

 now a hundred. The other day I heard that at these 

 works one research chemist who was paid ,1,000 a 



1 It is a satisfaction to me, however, on this point to remember that my 

 late friend Schorlemmer was at my suggestion appointed to a special chair 

 of Organic Chemistry at Owens College, the only chair of this kind in 

 the country, and also that his successor, Professor Perkin, is continuing on 

 even a more extended scale and with greater means at his disposal in the 

 new Schorlemmer Laboratory the teaching of organic chemistry to the 

 most advanced point, and that young men are being turned out as fully 

 equipped in this department as from any of the German schools. 



