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B.—CHEMISTRY. 55 
eampaign which then will follow, chemistry must occupy a prominent 
place because it is this branch of science which deals with matter more 
intimately than any other, revealing its properties, its transformations, 
its application to existing needs, and its response to new demands. 
Yet the majority of our people are denied the elements of chemistry 
in their training, and thus grow to manhood without the slightest real 
understanding of their bodily processes and composition, of the wizardry 
by which living things contribute to their nourishment and to their 
ssthetic enjoyment of life. 
Tt should not be impossible to bring into the general scheme of 
secondary education a sufficiency of chemical, physical, mechanical, 
and biological principles to render every boy and girl of sixteen 
possessing average intelligence at least accessible by an explanation of 
modern discoveries. One fallacy of the present system is to assume 
that relative proficiency in the inorganic branch must be attained before 
approaching organic chemistry. From the standpoint of correlating 
scholastic knowledge with the common experiences and contacts of daily 
life this is quite illogical; from baby’s milk to grandpapa’s Glaxo 
the most important things are organic, excepting water. Food (meat, 
carbohydrate, fat), clothes (cotton, silk, linen, wool), and shelter (wood) 
are organic, and the symbols for carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen 
can be made the basis of skeleton representations of many fundamental 
things which happen to us in our daily lives without first explaining 
their position in the periodic table of all the elements. The curse of 
mankind is not labour, but waste; misdirection of time, of material, of 
epportunity, of humanity. 
Realisation of such an ideal would people the ordered communities 
with a public alive to the verities, as distinct from irrelevancies of life, 
and apprehensive of the ultimate danger with which civilisation is 
threatened. It would inoculate that public with a germ of the nature- 
motive, producing a condition which would reflect itself ultimately upon 
those entrusted with government. It would provide the mental and 
sympathetic background upon which the future truthseeker must work, 
long before he is implored by a terrified and despairing people to provide 
them with food and energy. Finally, it would give an unsuspected 
meaning and an unimagined grace to a hundred commonplace 
experiences. The quivering glint of massed bluebells in broken sun- 
shine, the joyous radiance of young beech-leaves against the stately 
cedar, the perfume of hawthorn in the twilight, the florid majesty of 
rhododendron, the fragrant simplicity of lilac, periodically gladden the 
most careless heart and the least reverent spirit; but to the chemist 
they breathe an added message, the assurance that a new season of 
yefreshment has dawned upon the world, and that those delicate 
syntheses, into the mystery of which it is his happy privilege to 
penetrate, once again are working their inimitable miracles in the 
laboratory of the living organism. 
