AMERICA'S INFERIOR POSITION 



Perhaps in the minds of some, obsessed with the 

 notion that a new country necessarily means a 

 new people, and that the gentler nurture of the 

 intelligence which we call the sciences and the arts 

 had small show in America until recent years, it 

 will be judged that I have had here under view a 

 time too long. It will not be difficult to find a 

 science that belongs wholly to recent years, where, 

 therefore, our own country has had an equal chance 

 with any other. Take a special province of chem- 

 istry that has become of great commercial impor- 

 tance within a very few years electro-chemistry. 



Whatever scattered processes might have exist- 

 ed prior to 1885, the science itself was then a thin 

 and meagre affair. All that was known might have 

 been acquired in an hour or two of close applica- 

 tion. Though Clausius in Germany and William- 

 son in England made tentative efforts at a con- 

 sistent scientific theory about the middle of the 

 century, the discoveries of Faraday in the thirties 

 represented the sole progress from the conceptions 

 of Grotthaus, which date from 1805, and are still 

 to be found in many American text-books in cur- 

 rent use. The moot question was one that had the 

 greatest importance to chemistry in general, and 

 particularly to the chemical explanation of life 

 processes : What happens when a substance is dis- 

 solved in water or other liquid? 



