Oct. 25, 1883] 



NATURE 



613 



stantial honours that were showered upon him for many 

 years, from grants of money to honorary distinctions of the 

 highest order, must have gone far to compensate for a 

 malady which had for several years left him bed-ridden. 

 The high reputation he so suddenly acquired, more 

 especially in England, was doubtless mainly due to the 

 friendship of Sir Charles Lyell, who constantly quoted his 

 works, almost to the exclusion of those of other writers on 

 similar subjects. His quickness in seizing the characters 

 of even fragments of fossil leaves, his aptitude in describing 

 them combined with the boldness of his inductions and 

 a certain grace of diction, centred attention on his 

 work, and unconsciously diverted it from his eminent 

 contemporaries, Unger, Goeppert, Saporta, and Ettings- 

 hausen. The place he occupied was unique, and his 

 opportunities were proportionally great ; his loss will be 

 felt, for it will be difficult to find workers, as competent, 

 either able or willing to dispose with such rapidity of the 

 constantly increasing material brought from distant, and 

 especially Arctic, expeditions 



The subject which he had thus made his own is one of 

 exceptional difficulty, both from its wide range and the 

 character of the material to be dealt with, and the path 

 which he trod with such assured steps will be trodden by 

 others with doubt and hesitation. If imitation is the 

 sincerest form of flattery, then was Heer most amply 

 flattered, for nearly all works on the newer fossil floras 

 have been modelled on his bases, and he has become the 

 founder of a school which bids fair to monopolise for 

 some lime to come this branch of palaeontology. It is no 

 disrespect to the dead to mention the open secret that nearly 

 all English botanists, and very many geologists, have 

 doubted the possibility of determining, except in rare 

 instances, the detached and broken leaves which make 

 up nine-tenths of the Tertiary floras. It is fortunate that 

 Heer's temperament was sanguine, and his belief in his 

 power to interpret the material unlimited, else the mar- 

 vellous Tertiary floras from the Arctic circle, nhich so 

 profoundly exercise the imagination, would have remained 

 a sealed book. His powers are the more surprising, as 

 his health does not appear to have permitted much 

 travel, a winter spent on the cultivated side of Madeira 

 seeming to have been his only actual acquaintance with 

 extra-European floras. Much of his work, too, was pro- 

 duced under conditions the reverse of favourable for exact 

 determination and comparison : a friend relates that when 

 calling to convey one of the numerous awards made to 

 him by English scientific bodies, he found the Professor 

 lying down with a small table arranged to cross the bed, 

 upon it being specimens which he named while an 

 assistant made drawings. 



Besides the fossil florasand insectfaunis ofhis own coun- 

 try, his works comprise, among many others, descriptions 

 of the Carboniferous, Jurassic, Cretaceous, and Tertiary 

 floras from round the Arctic circle, and from Germany, 

 Austria, Italy, Portugal, and even more distant countries. 

 In 1861 he was invited to England to describe the Ter- 

 tiary flora from Bovey Tracey, and a work appeared upon 

 it in the Phil. Trans, of the following year. It is cer- 

 tainly strange that this and nearly the whole of the fossil 

 floras containing dicotyledons examined by him have 

 been referred to the Miocene age, and certain prevailing 

 types seem to recur in the greater part of them ; but it is 

 not our province to discuss the correctness of these views 

 here. He was much in earnest and zealous in the ex- 

 treme, and the importance and value of his work, includ- 

 ing as it does figures and descriptions of species which 

 may almost be numbered by the thousand, is incontest- 

 able. So much accomplished, in spite of ill health and 

 probably with less extensive herbaria to consult than are 

 available in this country, commands respect ; and how- 

 ever the study of fossil plants may rank in the time to 

 come, Heer's name will for ever be bound up with it as 

 its great pioneer. 



THE BACKWARD STATE OF CHEMISTRY IN 

 ENGLAND 



T N the address of the President of the British Associa- 

 ■*■ tion last year the report as to progress in one of the 

 principal Sections, that of Chemistry, is certainly a very 

 meagre one. It is indeed confined to a general statement 

 of the value of materials derived from coal and coal-tars, 

 &c, and cannot, strictly speaking, be termed chemical. 

 Again, in the address of the President of the Chemical 

 Section, the existence of such a branch or division of 

 chemistry as that termed "organic," and in which more 

 perhaps has been done during the past twenty years than 

 in mineral chemistry during the century, is completely 

 ignored. And unfortunately the reason does not seem 

 far to seek, for very few of the papers presented to the 

 section had direct connection with the chemistry of 

 carbon. 



But it is not only at the British Association meetings 

 that this neglect of organic chemistry occurs, but even at 

 the Chemical Society itself the number of contributions 

 to this section of chemistry is very small. In 1881, out of 

 more than eighty communications to the Society only 

 about thirty are relating to carbon compounds. In 1882 

 the proportion is somewhat greater — thirty-one out of 

 sixty-five. It would be perhaps very unfair to institute a 

 comparison between our Chemical Society and a much 

 younger one, that of Berlin, as they are somewhat different 

 in constitution : and the feeding ground, if it may be so 

 called, is more extensive in the one case than in the other, 

 but still the disparity in number of papers is scarcely to 

 be accounted for in this way. 



Chemistry generally, and especially the so-called or- 

 ganic chemistry, appears to have been very much neglected 

 for some years past in this country. 



The cause of this lagging behind, especially in a science 

 of such infinite practical applications as chemistry, by this 

 country is somewhat difficult to understand. 



We certainly have not the number of chemical schools 

 in England as in Germany, but making allowance for that 

 and comparing the past decade in the two countries we 

 appear to be grievously behind, both in number of inves- 

 tigations as well as in their theoretical or practical im- 

 portance. 



The cause can scarcely be attributed to any want of 

 energy or appreciation of the value of research on the 

 part of our manufacturers, for they are in many instances 

 obliged lo seek assistance out of the country. It seems 

 to some extent rather to be owing to a non-appreciation 

 of the science by the general public, although in its more 

 elementary stages it is more extensively taught than in 

 any other country, and this non-appreciation reacts 

 injuriously on the schools themselves. Although such an 

 intensely practical science and capable of such varied 

 applications, the chemical investigator must pass over 

 many weary stretches of complex and to all appearance 

 purely theoretical and useless work before reaching a 

 brilliant practical result. 



Unfortunately, until quite recently but few of our schools 

 were so constituted and equipped that a student might 

 work on anything like equal terms with his fellow in a 

 German school. 



Now, however, we have a goodly number of chemical 

 schools rising up, with in many cases professors trained in 

 German laboratories. But in many of these the professor 

 labours under the great disadvantage, not only to himself 

 and the science, but to the students, that he has too 

 much mere routine teaching and too little time for that 

 original work, or research, which acts so powerfully in 

 encouraging and stimulating his students to get more than 

 a mere insight into the working and mechanism of the 

 science, and become investigators themselves. 



The cost of working in an English laboratory is some- 

 what greater than in a German one, but this difference is 



