96 MORRIS LOEB 



of our colleagues are so well known, that all the business comes 

 to them which they can handle. But the many additional 

 independent chemists, whom our commercial situation de- 

 mands, can only establish themselves if they can secure proper 

 laboratory facilities, without hiring attics in tumble-down 

 rookeries. 



Every year scores of New Yorkers graduate in chemistry 

 from our local institutions and return from years of protracted 

 study in other American and European institutions. They are 

 enthusiastic for research; in completing their theses they have 

 laid aside definite ideas for subsequent experimentation; 

 but they have no laboratory. While waiting to hear from the 

 teachers' agency where they have registered, while carrying 

 on desultory correspondence with manufacturers who may 

 give them a chance, they do not venture upon expenditure 

 of time and money to fit out a private laboratory, which they 

 may be called upon to quit any minute upon the appearance 

 of that desired appointment. Often necessity or tedium will 

 cause them to accept temporary work of an entirely different 

 character and indefinitely postpone the execution of the ex- 

 periments which they had mapped out. Who will estimate 

 the loss of scientific momentum, the economic and intellec- 

 tual waste, which this lack of laboratory facilities for the 

 graduate inflicts upon New York, as compared with Berlin, 

 Vienna, Paris, and London? Either our universities and 

 colleges, or private enterprise, should provide temporary 

 desk-room for the independent research chemist. 



So much for the purely practical side of our question. 

 How about the opportunities for presenting the results of 

 investigation? We all appreciate the excellence of the three 

 chemical journals published by our own society, as well as 

 that of the Society of Chemical Industry, and we may say 

 that these, together with the independently conducted peri- 



