SEPTEMBER II, 1902] 
NATURE 
467 
with other and even larger concerns in the same industry, has 
paid out of profits for immense extensions usually charged to 
capital account. There is one of these factories the works and 
plant of which stand in the books at 1,500,000/., while the 
money actually sunk in them approaches to 5,000,000/ In 
other words, the practical monopoly enjoyed by the German 
manufacturers enables them to exact huge profits from the rest 
of the world, and to establish a position which, financially as 
well as scientifically, is almost unassailable. I must repeat that 
the fundamental discoveries upon which this gigantic industry is 
built were made in this country, and were practically developed 
to a certain extent by their authors. But in spite of the abun- 
dance and cheapness of the raw material, and in spite of the 
evidence that it could be most remuneratively worked up, these 
men founded no school and had practically no successors. The 
coleurs they made were driven out of the field by newer and 
better colours made from their stuff by the development of their 
ideas, but these improved colours were made in Germany and 
not in England. Now what is the explanation of this extra- 
ordinary and disastrous phenomenon ? I give it in a word—want 
of education. We had the material in abundance when other 
nations had comparatively little. We had the capital, and 
we had the brains, for we originated the whole thing. But 
we did not possess the diffused education without which 
the ideas of men of genius cannot fructify beyond the 
limited scope of an individual. I am aware that our patent 
laws are sometimes held responsible. Well, they are a con- 
tributory cause ; but it must be remembered that other nations 
with patent laws as protective as could be desired have not 
developed the colour industry. The patent laws have only 
contributed in a secondary degree, and if the patent laws have 
been bad, the reason for their badness is again want of educa- 
tion. Make them as bad as you choose, and you only prove 
that the men who made them, and the public whom these men 
try to please, were misled by theories instead of being con- 
versant with fact and logic. But the root of the mischief is not 
in the patent laws or in any legislation whatever. It is in the 
want of education among our so-called educated classes, and 
secondarily among the workmen on whom these depend. It is 
in the abundance of men of ordinary plodding ability, thoroughly 
trained and methodically directed, that Germany at present has 
so commanding an advantage. It is the failure of our schools 
to turn out, and of our manufacturers to demand, men of this 
kind, which explains our loss of some valuable industries and 
our precarious hold upon others. Let no one imagine for a 
moment that this deficiency can be 1emedied by any amount of 
that technical training which is now the fashionable nostrum, 
It is an excellent thing, no doubt, but it must rest upon a foun- 
dation of general training. Mental habits are formed for good 
or evil long before men go to the technical schools. We have 
to begin at the beginning: we have to train the population 
from the first to think correctly and logically, to deal at first 
hand with facts, and to evolve, each one for himself, the solu- 
tion of a problem put befcre him, instead of learning by rote 
the solution given by somebody else. There are plenty of 
chemists turned out, even by our Universities, who would be of 
no use to Bayer and Co. They are chock full of formule, they 
¢an recite theories, and they know text-books by heart; but 
put them to solve a new problem, freshly arisen in the labora- 
tory, and you will find that their learning is all dead. It has 
not become a vital part of their mental equipment, and they are 
floored by the first emergence of the unexpected. The men 
who escape this mental barrenness are men who were somehow 
or other taught to think long before they went to the university. 
To my mind, the really appalling thing is not that the Germans 
have seized this or the other industry, or even that they may 
have seized upon a dozen industries. It is that the German 
population has reached a point of general training and specialised 
equipment which it will take us two generations of hard and 
intelligently directed educational work to attain. It is that 
Germany possesses a national weapon of precision which must 
give her an enormous initial advantage in any and every contest 
depending upon disciplined and methodised intellect. 
fistory of Cold and the Absolute Zero. 
It was Tyndall’s good fortune to appear before you at a 
moment when a fruitful and comprehensive idea was vivifying 
the whole domain of scientific thought. At the present time 
no such broad generalisation presents itself for discussion, while 
on the other hand the number of specialised studies has enor- 
NO. 1715, VOL. 66] 
mously increased. Science is advancing in so broad a front 
by the efforts of so great an army of workers that it would be 
idle to attempt within the limits of an address to the most in- 
dulgent of audiences anything like a survey of chemistry alone. 
But I have thought it might be instructive, and perhaps not un- 
interesting, to trace briefly in broad outline the development of 
that branch of study with which my own labours have been 
recently more intimately connected—a study which I trust I am 
not too partial in thinking is as full of philosophical interest 
as of experimental difficulty. The nature of heat and cold must 
have engaged thinking men from the very earliest dawn of specu- 
lation upon the external world ; but it will suffice for the pre- 
sent purpose if, disregarding ancient philosophers and even 
medieval alchemists, we take up the subject where it stood after 
the great revival of learning, and asit was regarded by the father 
of the inductive method. That this was an especially attractive 
subject to Bacon is evident from the frequency with which he 
recurs to it in his different works, always with lamentation over 
the inadequacy of the means at disposal for obtaining a consider- 
able degree of cold. Thus in the chapter in the Natural His- 
tory, ‘‘ Sylva Sylvarum,” entitled “ Experiments in consort 
touching the production of cold,” he says, ‘* The production of 
cold is a thing very worthy of the inquisition both for the use 
and the disclosure of causes. For heat and cold are nature’s two 
hands whereby she chiefly worketh, and heat we have in readi- 
ness in respect of the fire, but for cold we must stay ill it 
cometh or seek it in deep caves or high mountains, and when 
all is done we cannot obtain it in any great degree, for furnaces 
of fire are far hotter than a summer sun, but vaults and hills are 
not much colder thana winter’s frost.” The great Robert Boyle 
was the first experimentalist who followed up Bacon’s suggestions, 
In 1682 Boyle read a paper to the Royal Society on ‘‘ New Ex- 
periments and Observations touching Cold, or an Experimental 
History of Cold,” published two years later ina separate work, 
This is really a most complete history of everything known about 
cold up to that date, but its great merit is the inclusion of 
numerous experiments made by Boyle himself on frigorific mix- 
tures, and the general effects of such upon matter. The agency 
chiefly used by Boyle in the conduct of his experiments was the 
glaciating mixture of snow or ice and salt. In the course of his 
experiments he made many important observations. Thus he 
observed that the salts which did not help the snow or ice to 
dissolve faster gave no effective freezing, He, showed 
that water in becoming ice expands by about one-ninth 
of its volume, and bursts gun-barrels. He attempted to 
counteract the expansion and prevent freezing by completely 
filling a strong iron ball with water before cooling ; anticipating 
that it might burst the bottle by the stupendous force of expan- 
sion, or that if it did not, then the ice produced might under the 
circumstances be heavier than water. He speculated in an 
ingenious way on the change of water into ice. Thus he says, 
‘*{f cold be but a privation of heat through the recess of that 
ethereal substance which agitated the little eel-like particles of 
the water and thereby made them compose a fluid body, it may 
easily be conceived that they should remain rigid in the postures 
in which the ethereal substance quitted them, and thereby com- 
pose an unfluid body like ice ; yet how these little eels should by 
that recess acquire as strong an endeavour outwards as if they 
were so many little springs and expand themselves with so 
stupendous a force, is that which does not so readily appear.” 
The greatest degree of adventitious cold Boyle was able to pro- 
duce did not make air exposed to its action lose a full tenth of 
its own volume, so that, in his own words, the cold does not 
““weaken the spring by anything near so considerable as one 
would expect.” After making this remarkable observation and 
commenung upon its unexpected nature, it is strange Boyle did 
not follow it up. He questions the existence of a body of its 
own nature supremely cold, by participating in which all other 
bodies obtain that quality, although the doctrine of a primum 
rigidum had been accepted by many sects of philosophers ; for, 
as he says, *‘if a body being cold signify no more than its not 
having its sensible parts so much agitated as those of our sen- 
sorium, it suffices that the sun or the fire or some other agent, 
whatever it were, that agitated more vehemently its parts before, 
does either now cease to agilate them or agitates them but very 
remissly, so that till it be determined whether cold be a positive 
quality or but a privative it will be needless to contend what 
particular body ought to be esteemed the primum frigidum.” 
The whole elaborate investigation cost Boyle immense labour, 
and he confesses that he “never handled any part of natural 
