CHEMISTRY AND CIVILIZATION 1 



THAT invention is one of the chief factors in the world's 

 progress, and that scientific investigation is at least coordi- 

 nate with geographical discovery in widening the bounds set 

 to human comfort and well-being, are assertions which may 

 well be called axiomatic. To discuss the influence of scientific 

 discovery upon civilization might seem a sort of supereroga- 

 tion, a mere rhapsody on man's wit and energy; even the 

 slightest hint that all invention has not made for progress, 

 industrial or cultural, may possibly be taken as the mark of 

 black pessimism or whimsical conservatism. Yet no other 

 chain of events has proven, on nearer view, to have main- 

 tained a single direction; and that historian is not deemed un- 

 patriotic who recites impartially the failures as well as the 

 successes in his country's record, especially if a study of the 

 darker phases may lead to an avoidance of future pitfalls. 

 Thus, too, not every scientific theory or practical invention 

 must necessarily have been in the line of real progress; some 

 may have led to the squandering of nature's bounty, or per- 

 haps to the temporary disregard of some more important 

 line of research. It may, therefore, be both fruitful and in- 

 structive to attempt a closer study of the ultimate, as well 

 as the immediate effects of such innovations; besides obtain- 

 ing a more stereoscopic picture of an important branch of 

 human activity, we may derive some useful lesson, at a time 

 when the gradual exhaustion of the earth's stored wealth is 

 giving food for anxious thought. In attempting to measure 



1 The unfinished introduction to a projected treatise ; found in manuscript, 

 1912. 



