ee 
58 
NATURE 
[Marcu 18, 1915 

industry, and it is only through scientific. dis- 
covery that industry can rapidly advance. It is 
this fact which has been freely recognised in Ger- 
many, whereas it is from this fact that the great 
majority of Englishmen instinctively shrink. The 
German believes in shaping his practice on theory, 
whilst the Englishman moulds his practice on 
tradition and instinct, and avoids all theoretical 
considerations as far as he can. In the earlier 
stages of chemical industry, and whilst chemical 
science was in a rudimentary state, much was 
accomplished by the eminently practical instincts 
of Englishmen, but with the increasing complexity 
and refinement of the problems involved, progress 
has only become possible through profound know- 
ledge gained by unceasing investigation directed 
by theoretical considerations, and it has been 
during this later phase that such rapid strides 
have been made by the chemical manufacturers 
of Germany. 
Of all the chemical industries, the one which de- 
pends most entirely on a far-reaching knowledge 
of chemical theory is that of Synthetic Organic 
Products (Artificial Dyes, Drugs, Perfumes, etc.), 
for it would certainly require instincts.of even a 
super-British order to be capable of devising 
methods for the economic manufacture of such 
commodities as indigo, adrenalin, and ionone! 
It is not surprising, therefore, that this branch 
of chemical industry is almost entirely in German 
hands, whilst the other branches are, for the most 
part, gravitating in the same direction. 
It is not the unexpected which has happened, 
for that the neglect of science by our manufac- 
turers would inevitably lead to this result has 
been consistently preached by British chemists 
during the past forty years. The irony of the 
situation lies in the fact that this relative failure 
of our chemical industries to expand has gone on 
pari passu with a great increase in our output of 
chemical research, the quality of some of which 
has been of a particularly brilliant kind. That 
this capacity for research has remained almost 
wholly divorced from industry is due to the British 
manufacturer, who has almost entirely failed to 
attract into his works the more brilliant chemists 
trained in this country. The remuneration and 
prospects offered are in general of such a disad- 
vantageous character that they cannot be enter- 
tained excepting as a last resort. It is, more- 
over. the absence of any prospect of reasonable 
remuneration in industrial chemistry that greatly 
limits the study of chemistry as a profession in 
this country. The Government and the muni- 
NO. 2368, VOL. 95] 

' sealed. 
cipal corporations, in their capacity as employers 
of chemists, are no better than the manufacturers. 
That the British manufacturer is himself in 
general entirely ignorant of chemistry is the result 
of our antiquated system of education. . What- 
ever school he may have attended will almost cer- 
tainly have been presided over by a headmaster 
-reared in traditions of medievalism, with the re- 
sult that he probably imbibed the idea that the 
study of science would relegate him to an inferior 
position in the school; at the university, unless he 
were reading either classics or mathematics, he 
| would not, even at the present day, be in the swim, 
and would find little or no favour with the head of 
his college, whilst until recently he would have been 
of no account at all. He would then pass into his 
hereditary position in the factory knowing nothing 
of the science upon which the business is based, 
and incapable of understanding even the alphabet 
of the language of the chemical officers it may 
possess. What wonder, then, that he distrusts 
and fears these chemists, who are the brain of 
his business, and that he prefers to confide in the 
engineers, who are but little less ignorant of 
| chemistry than himself. 
That this is the typical situation in the chemical 
industries of this country was revealed in a parti- 
cularly the House of 
Commons only a few nights ago, when the 
Government scheme of “British Dyes, Limited,” 
was under discussion. At the conclusion of the 
debate, the Parliamentary Secretary of the Board 
of Trade said that the man who was conversant 
with the science and practice of dye manufacture 
was unfit to go on the directorate, because, as he 
would know something of the business, the whole 
of the other directors, being but business men, 
would be in his hands. _We are thus authorita- 
tively informed, from his seat in Parliament, by 
the Secretary of the very Board which is entrusted 
with the duty to look after the commercial and 
industrial interests of the country, that the first 
qualification of a director of a public company 
subsidised by. the Government is that he must 
know nothing of the business in which that com- 
pany proposes to engage. Surely the report of 
this speech must have escaped the astigmatic eye 
of the official censor, or he would have passed 
his pencil over a piece of information so grati- 
fying and useful to the enemy! As Prof. Arm- 
strong, in commenting on this utterance in a 
letter to the Morning Post on Saturday last, very 
truly remarks: “Our fate as makers of dyes is 
We, the taxpayers, can do nothing but 
significant manner in 
