GERMAN SCIENCE 113 
meant to be disparaging ; they were primarily philosophers 
and theorists. The industries were related in a particularly 
clear way to abstruse science; they arose suddenly and un- 
mistakably out of scientific laboratories. Compare them, for 
example, with some other industry, such as glass manufacture. 
Glass manufacture did not arise from scientific investigations ; 
it grew from primitive times and evolved gradually in the 
hands of practical men. Its connexion with science is not 
apparent; people do not readily believe that it is as much 
a chemical operation as is the most high-sounding experi- 
mental transaction in a university laboratory; just as they 
cannot believe that water is as much and as truly a ‘ chemical’ 
as is Para-amido-benzene-azo-ortho-oxy-benzoic acid. ~ 
Whilst therefore it might be difficult, and it usually is 
difficult, to persuade a manufacturer of glass that a man 
trained in high science is likely to be a profitable ally, there 
could be no such doubt in connexion with the coal-tar in- 
dustries. The consequence was that these new German works 
made a constant demand on the very ablest, the most ardent 
philosophers among university students of chemistry. 
I think you will agree that if we had to convert a stiff- 
necked generation of industrialists to a belief that science, 
even of the most forbidding aspect, is worth consideration as 
what is called a business proposition, the most persuasive 
eloquence could hardly equal in effect the spectacle of a group 
of industries with a capital of twenty-five millions openly 
declaring that they were made and sustained by high science, 
all of them paying a steady dividend of something like twenty- 
five per cent. I believe that as a matter of fact the influence 
of such a state of things in Germany has been most potent. 
It is true, no doubt, that before the coal-tar industries arose 
there was in Germany a disposition to encourage the study of 
science for its own sake, there was a disposition to associate 
it with industry; but such tendencies have been greatly 
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