September 25, 1908] 



SCIENCE 



397 



man were the members of the primitive 

 horde to whom gravitated the honors, the 

 wealth and the positions. But those who 

 worked up natural resources, those who 

 started maniifacture, who developed indus- 

 try and created wealth, were these not in 

 reality the important members of the early 

 community? Were they not in fact the 

 founders of our modern civilization 1 



The reader of histories of chemistry is 

 impressed at times by the emphasis laid 

 upon the early speculators in chemistry 

 who were all too apt in forming hypotheses. 

 The known facts of chemistry, as shown by 

 their applications in the industries, for 

 some periods, have not been so well investi- 

 gated and presented — I do not wish to dis- 

 parage the hypothesis, but it seems as 

 though the history of industrial chemistry 

 had not had its due. When the shadow of 

 the middle ages was lifting, in the four- 

 teenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, 

 and inquisitive physicians and priests and 

 others began to investigate and write on 

 chemical subjects they found in the chem- 

 ical industries of that time a wealth of 

 material. Through the times of church 

 and military domination, through the 

 period of alchemical investigation and 

 alchemical fraud, the industries appear to 

 have maintained their integrity and on the 

 whole to have handed down traditionally 

 the sure knowledge of those who had gone 

 before, along with additions as additional 

 knowledge was acquired. 



There is still a great opportunity for the 

 man who will trace the development of 

 industrial chemistry through all time and 

 show its continuous and logical develop- 

 ment. That there was such a continuous 

 development in spite of migration, war, 

 pestilence and theocracy, one must feel 

 certain. The industrial man usually es- 

 capes many of the vicissitudes of life ex- 

 cept poverty and work. It is easy for 



priest and soldier to quarrel with the man 

 of strongly expressed ideas and of great 

 self assertion, with the man striving for 

 wealth and power, difficult with the simple 

 manufacturer of raw materials into various 

 commodities. It wovild not do to say that 

 the manufacturer fared well through all 

 the changing fortunes of ancient and 

 medieval history, but we can well believe 

 that in spite of adverse conditions he main- 

 tained his processes, added to them, and 

 transmitted them to his successors by the 

 traditional route. 



The chemical technologist, represented 

 by the early workers in chemical industries, 

 preceded the industrial chemist as we know 

 him to-day. Unarmed by systematic knowl- 

 edge, unversed in the definite methods used 

 to-day in investigating chemical industrial 

 problems, he yet developed chemical indus- 

 try in some instances to a condition which 

 has not been modified in essential particu- 

 lars, by the accumulated scientific knowl- 

 edge of the present time. Consider, for 

 example, the soap industry. The world 

 over, soap is boiled to-day essentially as it 

 was in the sixteen hundreds, before the 

 birth of modern chemistry, two hundred 

 years before the composition of fats was 

 knovm, two hundred years before the na- 

 ture of the alkalies or the process of saponi- 

 fication were understood. To-day we re- 

 cover glycerol and salt, we use more soda 

 and less potash, we are more skilled in the 

 use of fillers in the manufacture, but on 

 the whole the procedure is the same em- 

 pirical one which has been used for three 

 hundred years. In recent months some- 

 thing has been accomplished by Leims- 

 dorfer in Germany and Mereklen in 

 France, to rescue soap manufacture from 

 empiricism, but the day is yet distant when 

 scientific practise will be substituted for 

 practical experience. 



In many chemical industries the same 



