THE EIGHTH INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS 

 OF APPLIED CHEMISTRY 1 



WITHIN a few weeks will occur an event of supreme im- 

 portance to American chemists and especially to those inter- 

 ested in the branches of our science to which this Journal is 

 especially devoted : the meeting, in Washington and New 

 York, of the International Congress of Applied Chemistry. 

 Strictly speaking, this is not the first time that such an 

 organization has met on American soil, since the first im- 

 petus to the plan of these international meetings seems to 

 have been derived from the sessions of foreign and American 

 chemists who attended the Columbian Exhibition in Chicago 

 in 1893. Every World's Fair has, in recent years, been ac- 

 companied by meetings of specialists in sciences and arts; but 

 it must be remembered that they bear the relation of what 

 is popularly called a side-show to the Exhibition itself. They 

 are more or less haphazard in their relation to the general 

 world of science, and there is no continuity of management 

 from one occasion to the next. The various international 

 scientific congresses are autonomous; the experiences gathered 

 at one meeting are utilized in the preparation for the next 

 one; special problems are committed to the care of qualified 

 experts, for the report of authoritative opinion to the next 

 gathering, and the way is paved for that general world-wide 

 cooperation in the advancement of knowledge and the per- 

 fection of its utilization, which has been within narrower 

 limits the chief virtue of the various national organizations. 



It is just two hundred and fifty years since the Royal 



1 Editorial, reprinted from Journ. Ind. and Eng. Chem., p. 556, 1912. 



