B.— CHEMISTRY S3 



education must incorporate the new knowledge and the new ideas. It 

 does appear, however, that the attempt to present these in all their detail 

 to the undergraduate chemist has involved correspondingly sketchy treat- 

 ment of less novel, but still fundamental, elements of his training. Further, 

 in the chemical and physico-chemical fields opened up by these new 

 developments there has been a luxuriant growth of theory and speculation, 

 often ephemeral in character and rendered impressive only by a buttressing 

 of mathematics. A good deal of this enters into the university teaching of 

 chemistry, but much of it has merely an examination value and contributes 

 nothing to the permanent equipment of the average student — the man 

 whose interests must be kept steadily in view. 



The present prominence of this ' armchair ' chemistry suggests that 

 there is another consideration which we academic people are apt to forget. 

 So far at least as the service of the community is concerned chemistry is 

 a practical science and the most of the students under training are to be 

 practising chemists. Academic purists may protest that chemistry is a 

 philosophical discipline, not a bread and butter affair, and that any- 

 thing savouring of vocational training is foreign to the function of a 

 University. It is, however, to the national interest that knowledge and 

 action should be co-ordinated and that our Universities should not be 

 divorced from practical affairs. The existence of our Faculties of 

 Medicine and Engineering shows that in other important fields of national 

 service the Universities have accepted the burden of putting vocational 

 training on a broad foundation of scientific knowledge. In the training 

 of the chemist, then, knowledge of fundamental principles must be 

 coupled with practical competence, craftsmanship and technique, and 

 here I would stress the importance of accurate quantitative analysis as one 

 essential element in the education of the chemical student. Apart from 

 its value as enforcing the essentially exact nature of chemical reactions, 

 experience shows that the successful solution of organic or physico- 

 chemical problems depends in a great many instances on some accurate 

 analytical operation. Laboratory practice and craftsmanship in general, 

 the value of which is discounted by certain schools of physicists to-day, is 

 indeed an indispensable feature of the training of the chemist. 



Along with the laboratory I should like to emphasise the importance of 

 the library, and here I refer, not to general university facilities, but to a 

 departmental library, small it may be but workmanlike, and run as a real 

 element in the chemist's training. With their eye on examinations many 

 students regard lectures and laboratories as providing the sum total of all 

 wisdom, and yet it is essential that they should have direct access to the 

 original sources of information and learn how to use them. This is best 

 done in a departmental library, accessible and up to date, but success will 

 be achieved only when responsible members of the staff take a real interest 

 in this side of the student's training, and make the library a live affair. 



No single science is self-contained and no man can be a chemist without 

 some knowledge and experience of cognate fields. Hence it is appropriate 

 that the undergraduate student of chemistry should study physics or 

 biology, for example, as a subsidiary subject, and this is generally provided 

 for in the courses which lead to an Honours Degree in Chemistry as the 



