2 5 o POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



great expense by incorporating upon the present programme systems 

 of lectures and of manipulations; the lectures to consist of the expo- 

 sition of the principal chemical industries, and the laboratory work 

 of industrial preparations and applications; and the students should 

 be exercised in comparing manufactured products and in studying 

 the general methods pursued in industrial research, the processes 

 adopted for increasing returns, and other branches of similar bear- 

 ing. Such instruction demands special fitness teachers who are 

 familiar with industries and love them. That is the basis of the 

 reform I propose. In order to teach the applications of science, 

 to make known the methods, processes, and desiderata of industry, 

 one must have studied and practiced them himself. He must him- 

 self have been a workman. Whatever may be the value of our mas- 

 ters, however great may be their intelligence, they can not develop 

 knowledge in the minds of their pupils that is foreign to themselves, 

 or make them adopt methods of labor which they have never them- 

 selves seen applied. 



I have already received protestations from the teaching body 

 against seeing men raised to the dignity of professors or lecturers 

 men who have not their diplomas as licentiates or doctors in science. 

 But I really do not believe that the possession of these diplomas is 

 indispensable to the purpose toward which I am looking; and I 

 fancy that for the treatment of industrial questions it is sufficient 

 to understand them for one's self. 



The teaching of which I have thus sketched the programme 

 might be given at the close of the studies of our young chemists and 

 constitute the crowning of them. The reform I propose consists, 

 then, simply in opening our chemical schools and institutes to lec- 

 tures and manipulations in applied chemistry, and in confiding this 

 special teaching to professors who have themselves been engaged 

 in industry. Translated for the Popular Science Monthly from the 

 Revue Scientifique. 



It has long been a question how the priestly office became so associated 

 with bridge-building that that function should have given their principal 

 official titles (pontifex, pontiff) to the Roman chief priest and the Pope. 

 An attempt at an explanation is made by Herr Rudolph von Ihering, in his 

 Evolution of the Aryans, who says: "All the branches of the pontifical 

 duties may be traced back to the original demands laid upon the technical 

 bridge-makers of the migratory period ; their priestly office, to the necessity 

 of the expiatory sacrifice to the river god, which could not be offered by 

 the Flamens. who were the priests of the national divinities only ; their 

 skill in writing, to the drawing of the plan of the bridge ; their chronol- 

 ogy? to the estimation of the proportions of the bridge ; their relation to the 

 law, to the claim of the river god upon the bridge toll." 



