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with such material at their disposal manufacturers have 
been successful in maintaining their businesses fully 
abreast of the times. 
The post-graduate career is equally different abroad. 
A graduate is not worshipped as a young god because he 
happens to have passed examinations with distinction, 
nor is he damned for life by being termed a second or 
third class man because he did indifferently well. Nor 
is he a prig, for although sufficiently proud of being 
dubbed “ Herr Doctor,” he knows full well that his future 
success depends on what he does, not on what he has 
done in some examination. In fact the examination 
is forgotten almost as soon as over, and if a professional 
career at the University be adopted, a man has to work 
very hard for every step of promotion, and is rewarded 
only if he manifest originality and activity in research. 
And manufacturers have also recognised that they 
cannot expect to obtain all the material they need ready 
made from the Universities ; the true technical school in 
Germany is in connection with the works, each of which 
has its research department, in which men certified by 
the Universities as likely to do well are set to work 
under competent leaders and gradually learn to do 
what is required of them in practice: those who 
manifest technical skill being gradually drafted off into 
the works proper. The English manufacturer too often 
expects the scientific assistant he engages to be already 
conversant with the industry—to be a practical man; 
he will rarely be at the pains to educate his staff. He 
derides college-bred material, and yet will do nothing 
towards producing a genuine article. 
It is clear that if we are to fit ourselves to carry on 
the work in the world we have undertaken, and to 
justify our having taken so vast a burden of imperial 
responsibility on our shoulders, an entire reform of 
our educational system, starting from the Universities, 
must be brought about. We have long since reached 
the point “where toleration sinks into sheer baseness 
and poltroonery”; and we must no longer allow mediocrity 
to be our ideal. The attempt must be made to awaken 
the public generally to a more thorough understanding 
of the position in which the country is placed. It must 
be shown that we also have an “aristocracy of talent” 
capable of advising honestly and well and with understand- 
ing ; that the methods hitherto adopted have too often 
been unsound ; but that sound methods are now available, 
and their use must be insisted on. If those who are 
capable of working in such a cause—and there are very 
many—will but cooperate, there need be no great delay in 
formulating and carrying out the changes that are most 
urgently and imperatively called for: but how are we to 
effect the necessary organisation of scientific opinion, and 
secure that its decisions shall be carried into practice? It 
will be very difficult, and yet it must be done, and without 
delay. It can only be done if—to use words uttered by 
Helmholtz—* each of us think of himself, not as a man 
seeking to gratify his own thirst for knowledge, or to 
promote his own private advantage, or to shine by his 
own abilities, but rather as a fellow-labourer in one great 
common work bearing upon the highest interests of 
humanity.” HENRY E. ARMSTRONG. 
(To be continued.) 
NO. 1428, VOL. 55] 
THE GASES OF THE ATMOSPHERE. 
The Gases of the Atmosphere: the History of their 
Discovery. By William Ramsay, F.R.S., Professor of 
Chemistry in University College, London. Pp. 240: 
(London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1896.) 
HE reading public will be grateful to Prof. Ramsay 
for this book, for he has explained in a simple and 
attractive manner the nature of the great discovery about 
which they have heard much and understood little ; 
and besides telling the story of argon, he has woven it 
into a history of the great discoveries of the past con- 
cerning the chemistry of the atmosphere. We believe 
that the book will be acceptable also to more scientific 
people who desire to gain a clear idea of the problems 
connected with the new gas. 
One of the peculiarities of the discovery of argon is 
the entire absence of anything about it of the “ prac- 
tical” kind, present or prospective. It is so far a mere 
scientific discovery, and has no telephone or bone-photo- 
graphing features to arouse a hollow intellectual interest. 
A book likely to enlist the public sympathy for scientific 
research, irrespective of its practical application, is to 
be heartily welcomed, and is probably no less a need of 
the times than it was a generation since. It is not well 
that the public esteem for physics and chemistry should 
depend wholly on a dim appreciation of their commercial 
value. 
The account which Prof. Ramsay gives of the 
earlier discoveries is very readable, abounding with quo- 
tations from the original memoirs, and affording pleasant 
glimpses of the lives and characteristics of the philo- 
sophers concerned. The volume is embellished with a 
number cf portraits, the honour of appearing in the 
frontispiece being accorded to Stephen Hales. This 
selection appears surprising, not only because of the 
slender connection of the work of Hales with the 
chemistry of the atmosphere, but from the feeling that 
in a book dealing with the history of the air in special 
relation to argon the conspicuous figure is that of Henry 
Cavendish. The merits of Cavendish have indeed been 
fully recognised by Lord Rayleigh and Prof. Ramsay in 
their Royal Society memoir, and the statement “that, if 
there is any part of the phlogisticated part of our atmo- 
sphere which differs from the rest and cannot be reduced to 
nitrous acid, we may safely conclude that it is not more 
than z4oth part of the whole,” will remain for ever 
memorable. It was the same respect for minutiz and 
strict loyalty to experiment as are embodied in the fore- 
going words, that led Lord Rayleigh, rather more than a 
century later, to raise again the question whether any part 
of the phlogisticated part of our atmosphere differs from 
the rest. The habitual attitude of chemists towards the 
clue contained in the above words of Cavendish is shown 
very well by the following passage from Dr. G. Wilson’s 
“Life of Cavendish” : “He proceeded to test this by 
trying whether a given volume of the phlogisticated part 
was entirely converted into nitric acid by explosion with 
oxygen. He found that it was, and thus supplied a 
demonstration of the homogeneous nature of nitrogen 
such as none of his contemporaries could have given.” 
The last hundred pages of the book contain an account 
of the discovery of argon, and of the physical and 
