346 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. L. No. 1293 



same institution, has been appointed professor 

 of hygiene, succeeding Dr. John A. Amyst, 

 jwho has been appointed deputy minister of 

 health in the Federal Department of Health, 

 ■Ottawa. Dr. Pitzgerald will continue to act 

 as director of the Connaught Laboratories. 



Professor L. Bard, who for twenty years 

 has held the chair of clinical medicine at the 

 University of Geneva, has accepted a corre- 

 sponding position at the University of Stras- 

 burg. 



DISCUSSION AND CORRESPONDENCE 



EMIL FISCHER AFTER THE WAR 



The reading of Professor Harrow's highly 

 appreciative account, in Science of August 15, 

 of Emil Fischer and his work recalls to me a 

 meeting that I had with Fischer in February 

 of this year in Berlin. I have referred, in a 

 recent little book^ about Germany and Ger- 

 mans since the war, to a conversation which 

 Dr. Alonzo E. Taylor and I, officially repre- 

 senting Mr. Hoover and the American Food 

 Administration, had in our rooms in the Hotel 

 Adlon in Berlin one Sunday morning last 

 February with three distinguished German 

 scientific men. The conversation was pri- 

 marily an interview with these well-informed 

 men on the subject of the German food situ- 

 ation; we were there to try to find out just 

 what food importations were immediately nec- 

 essary to keep the German people from further 

 suffering and danger. "We had talked with 

 responsible officials of the new German gov- 

 ernment, and been presented with various 

 official statements by them, but we wanted to 

 check these by any unofficial information we 

 could obtain. Hence this Sunday morning 

 meeting in our hotel rooms with Karl BaUod, 

 Germany's foremost economic statistician, 

 Nathan Zuntz, one of her first animal physiol- 

 ogists, and Emil Fischer, her great organic 

 chemist. But as scientific and university 

 men our talk ran rather freely and frankly, 

 and touched other matters than food statistics. 



It was a conversation of fascinating interest, 



1 ' ' Germany in the "War and After, ' ' 1919, Mae- 

 millan Co., N. Y. 



with Fischer the dominant figure in it. 

 Ballod, tall and spare, of serious mien, was 

 rather restrained and precise; Zuntz, small 

 and active, even smiling, was perhaps a little 

 exaggeratedly gracious; Fischer, heavy-bodied, 

 vigorous and emphatic, was easy and with no 

 trace of self-consciousness. All agreed on the 

 terrible seriousness of the situation but each 

 had special views as to the more pressing 

 necessities and means of meeting them. All 

 declared that they had realized for more than 

 a year the practical certainty of Germany's 

 ultimate collapse, but replying to our ques- 

 tions as to why they had not used their knowl- 

 edge of the fatal food and general economic 

 situation to prevail on the German authorities 

 to try to end the war while an ending might 

 be made that would be less disastrous than any 

 that could come after a further persistence in 

 the struggle, all declared their complete help- 

 lessness to exercise a sufficient influence on 

 rulers or people. " "We should not have been 

 heard at first and before we could push the 

 matter to a general hearing we should have 

 been in prison or have had to flee the country 

 to avoid it. Remember Forster and Nicolai 

 and Muehlon," they said. 



They told of their own difficulties to find 

 food for themselves and families, despite their 

 sufficient financial means, and then spoke 

 especially of the teiTible hardships of their 

 less well paid colleagues and small-salaried 

 assistants. Fischer, in particular, revealed 

 his sympathy for his distressed helpers, while 

 all three spoke of the serious handicap the 

 situation had been on the work in the scientific 

 institutions with which they were affiliated. 



But while Ballod looked on the future 

 darkly, and Zuntz with no confidence, Fischer 

 was more sanguine. He said : " We have got 

 to start again, but we can start." "When we 

 told him that both America and England had 

 made some headway during the war period in 

 the production of dyes and optical glass and 

 some other things that had been a monopoly of 

 Germany in the days before the war, and that 

 we should be far more independent in such 

 ways than we had been before, Fischer was 

 silent a moment, thoughtful and serious of 

 face, but soon looked up and said : " "Well, that 



