GERMANY IN SCIENCE 11 



man workmen in their use. By the by, the same Eli Whitney, 

 who invented the cotton-gin, was the first to originate the mak- 

 ing of fire-arms with standardized parts in the arsenals of the 

 United States, for which he received the thanks of the 

 Government. Machinery for threading screws capable of 

 detecting errors the twenty-thousanths of an inch are the pro- 

 duct of American machine-shops, and are in common use. 



Let us pass from physics to chemistry. The Germans 

 have perhaps done more in chemistry than in any other branch 

 of science, and deserve recognition for the applications of 

 chemical knowledge which they have made along certain 

 lines. There are some great names among those who have 

 belonged to the army of German chemists, such as Brandt, 

 Glaus, Stromeyer, Klaproth, Ostwald, and van't Hoff, neither 

 of the two latter, however, being in fact Germans, the first 

 having been born in Russia, the latter in Holland, but both 

 having held chairs in German universities. Nevertheless the 

 greatest names in chemistry are not these. Contrast with 

 them the names of the great founders of the science: in Eng- 

 land, Boyle, Priestley, Dalton, Cavendish, Wollaston, and in 

 later times such men as Lord Rayleigh, and Sir William Ram- 

 say; in France, Lavoisier, Laurent, Ampere, Gay-Lussac, Du- 

 mas, and recently the Curies; in Sweden, Berzelius, nomen 

 venerabile! in Italy, Avogadro and Cannizaro. 



While cheerfully admitting that German chemists have 

 done noble work, they were nevertheless building for the 

 most part on foundations already laid for them by others who 

 were not of German origin. 



We hear a great deal in these days about Germany's 

 supremacy in the manufacture of dyes derived from coal-tars, 

 and the story of the invention of synthetic indigo has been 

 so often told that it is becoming threadbare; but let me re- 

 mind you that the distillation of coal-tars and benzene had its 

 origin in England, and though anilin, produced through the 

 reaction of nitric acid with benzene, was first discovered by 

 the German chemist, Unverdorben, in 1826, it was not until 

 W. H. Perkin, an Englishman, in 1856 had derived from it the 



