THE TRAINING OF PIONEERS 47 



He may be able to put on half a sheet of notepaper 

 that which will keep in prosperity a whole class in 

 the community for a generation. But, being a 

 chemist and not a business man, at the end of that 

 time he will be lucky if he is still outside the poor- 

 house, and still more lucky if he can still call any 

 shred of his discoveries his own. He is no indi- 

 vidualist. He knows that every step on the long 

 road leading up to his discoveries, except the last 

 little step he made himself, was laboriously taken by 

 his predecessors and colleagues and presented to him 

 as a free gift in the past. 



This sort of chemist, the real discovering person, 

 is a very rare bird, but a few of them would go a very 

 long way. It is almost needless to say that this is 

 not the sort of chemist that is specially catered for 

 by university curricula. In fact, from the business 

 point of view he is a thoroughly bad investment. 

 He pays no more fees than his far more numerous 

 class-mates, his training is preposterously expensive, 

 if he is to know his subject and not merely to know 

 about it, and, worse still, when he is hatched, no one, 

 scarcely even his own professor, can really be quite 

 sure whether he is a swan or a goose. 



Obviously, with universities whose finances are 

 managed by business men, the good staple lines of 

 chemical students are far more attractive. You can 

 turn them out in large numbers relatively cheaply ; 

 there is always a steady demand, their fees aggregate 

 to a considerable sum and bear an appreciable 

 proportion to the costs of their education. The first- 

 year medical students are the most numerous and 

 uniform in their requirements in the Scottish univer- 

 sities. Then there are those who are going to be 

 teachers, and take chemistry for a year as one of the 

 science subjects they are allowed, in strict moderation, 

 to take for an Arts degree. Lastly, there are the 



