NATURE 



49 



THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 21, 1907. 



MODERN SCIENCE AND AMERICAN 

 TECHNOLOGY. 

 The Chemistry of Commerce. A Simple Interpreia- 

 tion of some Ncm Chemistry in its Relation to 

 Modern Industry. By Robert Kennedy Duncan. 

 Pp. x + 263. (London and New York: Harper 

 and Brothers, 1907.) 



THE author of the book with this alliterative and 

 not very apt title is a teacher of chemical 

 technolog^y in a university of one of the western 

 States of North America. He appears to have spent 

 a year's leave in Europe in making- himself more or 

 less familiar with certain manufacturing processes 

 depending upon more or less recondite facts of 

 modern chemistry, and he is constrained to publish 

 what he has learnt in the hope of convincing the 

 American manufacturer, in particular, that modern 

 science is " absolutely applicable " to the economy and 

 progress of his operations. He was the more en- 

 couraged to put forth the present attempt for the 

 reason that, as he tells us, a former venture of his 

 received " words of appreciation " from mining 

 engineers in South Africa and school teachers in 

 China, as well as from captains of the navy and 

 captains of industry. From which we may infer that 

 the professor of industrial chemistry at the University 

 of Kansas, of whose literary productions we confess 

 we were hitherto in complete ignorance, is in reality 

 one of the most widely-read authors of his time. 



The dozen chapters of which the book is made up 

 are so many detached fragments, and from the fact 

 that they have been copyrighted at different times 

 during the last three years, they would seem to be 

 reprints of magazine or newspaper articles. Their 

 literary style is indeed characteristic of much of 

 Transatlantic journalism. When the author seeks to 

 be convincing he is merely turgid and inflated, and 

 what he strives to gain by emphasis he loses in the 

 effect which might have been secured by sober, 

 accurate, and impartial statement. Perhaps, how- 

 ever, Mr. Duncan is the best judge of the appetite of 

 the class for whom he caters. His own particular 

 world of educated laymen intellectually eager to 

 know of the advance of knowledge, who, we are 

 parenthetically informed, "are not fools," may like 

 to have what he calls their "pabulum " served up to 

 them hot and strong, and with plenty of condiments. 

 But in his attempts to whet that appetite the author 

 at times comes perilously near to the " sensational 

 misinformation " of which we gather " the other 

 fellow " has been occasionally guiltv. Whilst re- 

 gretfully admitting that in his book " there does not 

 inhere the romantic interest attached to radio-activity 

 and the nature of the chemist's atom," he vet claims 

 for it " the glorious interest that attaches to the 

 doing of real things." 



These extracts from the author's " foreword " are 



characteristic of the rest of the work. He has a 



passion for strong words, and his vocabulary is 



simply amazing. But unfortunately the words 



N&. 1986, VOL. 77] 



occasionally prove too strong for him; they get be- 

 yond his control — carry him off his feet, as it were — 

 and rush him into a labyrinth of phrases where he 

 gets effectually lost. 



But to a reader who is not over-fastidious as re- 

 gards literary style, or whose sensitiveness has been 

 dulled by daily perusal of the journalism of Kansas, 

 there is much in this book to interest and amuse. 

 To begin with, the reader will not be bored by too 

 much theory. Theory, we perceive, is not the 

 author's strong point, and he has little sympathy 

 with it. To him " the doing of real things is the 

 preferred work of the world." He never forgets 

 that he is a professor of technology. Speculations on 

 the why and wherefore are, of course, not wanted 

 in the eager, pushful, strenuous life of young 

 America — at least not in Kansas ; and as for the 

 question " Why is gold? " it is, we are told, as in- 

 soluble as the question "Why is a hen?" 



" No man of science can justifiably make of him- 

 self an anchorite." Shades of Cavendish and 

 Cayley ! Our author remembers a brilliant young 

 researcher who " told him that he had developed a 

 wholly new chapter in mathematics. ' And the best 

 of it is,' he said with a glow of enthusiasm, ' that it 

 can be of no earthly use, either practical or theoret- 

 ical ! ' Had that man passed observingly through the 

 vicious purlieus of the Bowery or through the vast 

 sordid stretches of East London, surely it would have 

 struck home to him that his work was not only not 

 right, that it was a crime." 



'oh ! Mathematics, Mathematics ! What crimes are 

 committed in thy name ! Perhaps it is an acute 

 consciousness of this that leads the man of Trinity 

 or the " gentle Johnian " to prefer King's Cross as 

 a mode of entry to London rather than gaze upon 

 the vast sordid stretches through which Liverpool 

 Street is reached, and which a too selfish devotion to 

 " pure " mathematics leaves neglected and un- 

 relieved. 



The American manufacturer, we gather, is not 

 over-sensitive. If he were, he would surely wince 

 under what the author calls the " stings and arrows " 

 which are hurled against him in this book. The 

 general character of much of American technology, 

 we are told, is summed up in the phrase, " Save at 

 the spigot and waste at the bung." What pulls 

 the manufacturers through, however, is " expert 

 office management," " efficiency of exclusive con- 

 trol obtained through business intrigue," " huge and 

 lying advertisements," combined with "gross adul- 

 teration of manufactured products." This is a fair 

 sample of the author's " pretty way " of expressing 

 himself, but as he is a professor of technology in 

 America he ought to know what he is talking about 

 when he deals with American technology, and we 

 must suppose, therefore, that his strictures are 

 merited. Certainly the evidence he affords of " the 

 utter stupidity and ignorance displayed by glass- 

 makers " (in America) in the chemistry of their 

 manufacture is only less marvellous than the in- 

 genuity they display in the complicated and efficient 

 mechanisms— for the most part of American origin 



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