CHEMISTRY AND NATIONAL 

 PROSPERITY 1 



I HAVE been asked by the Aberdeen Chamber of 

 Commerce to say a few words on the importance of 

 chemistry in the affairs of the nation, and the part 

 that skilled chemists can play in furthering the 

 general prosperity of the community. 



The war has been already the means of removing 

 some misconceptions and of the making of some 

 discoveries. It has, for example, discovered the 

 science of chemistry to a vast number of people, 

 not excluding Cabinet ministers, who hitherto have 

 associated it vaguely with the gilded mortar and 

 pestle and mysterious flagons of brightly coloured 

 fluids of the apothecary. Long ago a French savant 

 described us as a country where the apothecaries 

 call themselves chemists. Another discovery that is 

 destined to be made is the difference between money 

 and wealth. 



The wealth of a country is in its matter and 

 energy, matter, the passive resister, that in the 

 raw state will not do anything you want it to do ; 

 and energy, both animate and inanimate, which is 

 for ever trying to do what you do not want it to do, 

 and needs to be controlled. So man found the 

 world, and so, largely, till the beginning of last 



1 Address to the Annual Meeting of the Aberdeen Chamber of 

 Commerce, 8th February 1916. 



48 



