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 



