26 PROFESSORS AND PRACTICAL MEN 



My predecessors in this chair have, each in his turn, talked 

 to you of the subjects they have made their own ; and if I am 

 to come near to them at all, I shall be obliged to talk to you 

 on a subject which, so far as I can judge, everybody has made 

 his own. You can hardly meet the man who is not prepared 

 to talk about ' Education '. Even if he has had none, he is 

 ready to say how much (or how little) he has missed it, or 

 what it ought to have been if he had had it. It is often said 

 there is no bore like the educational bore. The other day a 

 very good friend of mine an admirable and humane man 

 told me roundly he hated the very word education. I can 

 well understand it ; but I bespeak your sympathy. If every 

 man you met who used or did not use coal gas was prepared 

 to offer you advice on the construction of a gasholder, you 

 would no doubt suggest, more or less directly, that he might 

 better mind his own business. But we whose business is 

 education cannot do likewise. We have to sit and listen, with 

 what patience we can summon, to every kind of public speaker 

 or writer who chooses to open the floodgates of his eloquence 

 upon us. But I suppose that if people only spoke in public 

 about what they had studied, the hush that would come upon 

 the world would be almost deathly. 



I should like to put before you a few of the conclusions to 

 which I have come after occupying for a quarter of a century 

 a professorial chair in an institution which, in large measure, 

 was designed to subserve the educational requirements of 

 industry. At the risk of being thought egotistical, I will 

 explain in the first instance that my father was. a railway 

 manager, and that I consequently passed my early life in an 

 atmosphere of strenuous business, where, for mere amusement, 

 I learnt the construction and working of a locomotive, how to 

 manage a signal box, and did a number of other practical 

 things. My first chemical experience was, in fact, in the rather 

 odd work of analysing the fuel, oils, metals, paints, and other 



