698 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXX. No. 777 



Deuteronomie codes were taught, and the 

 twenty volumes of the Talmud are to-day 

 the classics of that college of learning. 



It so happened that preachers became 

 teachers, and down to our present time we 

 have many colleges, all over the world, 

 where preachers are in charge and dictate 

 the policy of the institutions. 



I must not be misunderstood in any 

 criticism which I am about to make, for I 

 have no quarrel with any religious pro- 

 fession, but if we examine into the mental 

 status, and analyze the mind of the theo- 

 logian, we find that he is accustomed, once 

 or twice a week, to preach from the pulpit, 

 relieving his mind of opinions on questions 

 and subjects which have been thrashed out 

 time and again, and from the very nature 

 of his audience, and the sanctity of the 

 edifice from which he speaks, no one con- 

 tradicts, no one argues, no one says him 

 nay, until by that mental process with 

 which we are familiar, he believes himself 

 unanswerable, and takes even his glitter- 

 ing platitudes as facts undeniable. 



Such a man placed at the head of a uni- 

 versity where science is taught is evidently 

 not as good as a man who has been trained 

 to judge cause and result, and whose scien- 

 tific work has been criticized by his equals, 

 and as a comparison we have at least three 

 large and well-known colleges that I know 

 of — and, for all I know, there may be 

 many more — at whose head there are, or 

 were, chemists and scientists of distinction, 

 and every one of these has turned out men 

 who have given a good account of them- 

 selves. Nor do I want to except those ex- 

 cellent universities which are guided by li- 

 terarians and other intellectually developed 

 men other than theologians, for the suc- 

 cess of those colleges is equal, compara- 

 tively, to those presided over by chemists. 

 A school of medicine is best presided over 

 by a doctor, a school of engineering by a 

 man who is educated in one of its branches, 



a military school by a soldier, and a school 

 of theology by a minister of the gospel. 

 Our greatest success in schools of chemis- 

 try will therefore come from the very 

 chemists who direct their policy. 



Chemistry needs no sponsor, but its ef- 

 fect on civilization has been more marked 

 than that of any other science. True, it 

 has reached out and taken electricity and 

 physics as its aides, but withal, engineer- 

 ing made but little progress until steel and 

 cement, two chemical products, were cheap- 

 ened, simplified and made universal. 

 Medicine has claimed great honors, but the 

 masterful work done in coal tar chemis- 

 try, in the production and discovery of 

 synthetic drugs, the discovery of anesthet- 

 ics, the marvelous work done in the meta- 

 bolism of matter, the excellent analj^tical 

 schemes for the waste matter of the tissues, 

 are all due to the researches of chemistry, 

 and their civilizing influence is greatly 

 felt. 



Many a chapter has been written on the 

 regeneration of Germany. Where once 

 barren fields stood, so barren that food- 

 stuffs would not grow, there have arisen 

 vast works bristling with the stacks of fac- 

 tories, and thousands of commercial flow- 

 ers grow where once not even a weed would 

 flourish. And in all these plants chemists 

 are working, controlling the products that 

 are made, and creating new things, and 

 for every new and useful compound more 

 work is found, and whereas, emigration 

 was the rule in Germany thirty to fifty 

 years ago, and its best people left it like 

 rats from a sinking ship, to-day many are 

 immigrating, for it's a flourishing land 

 which chemistry has retrieved. Germany 

 was always poor up to ten or fifteen years 

 ago. With one or two possible exceptions, 

 no vast industries existed, and it had noth- 

 ing to export, but to-day its exports are 

 enormous, its people prosperous, in sad 

 comparison to its neighbor, Austria, where 



