Septembee 25, 1908] 



SCIENCE 



401 



tory, we have at times held too much aloof 

 from the needs of the manufacturing and 

 commercial community in which we dwell. 

 The analyst has done much, but we may 

 easily believe that he can do more. 



By the unmodified term chemist in the 

 industrial sense, we may understand one 

 who does more than analytical work, but 

 who has relatively little to do with con- 

 struction or industrial operations on the 

 large scale. He may be a consulting man, 

 a research man and an analyst besides 

 these, or in charge of a laboratory employ- 

 ing a number of men. Whatever his par- 

 ticular line of work, there are a number of 

 his class who appear to come in contact too 

 seldom with chemists in other lines, with 

 men of affairs, and with the activities of 

 their community. Their time is spent in 

 their laboratory or in their dwelling. Their 

 lives are, in the familiar phrase, too nar- 

 row. There is such a thing as develop- 

 ment by indirection, and who shall say that 

 that man is not literally a better chemist 

 who is more active in entirely different 

 lines during a portion of his day? I say 

 this particularly to the younger men who 

 are industriously working their way up in 

 large laboratories— get in touch with busi- 

 ness men and methods and with merely 

 practical manufacturers. Such associa- 

 tions lead to new points of view and are 

 most beneficial and suggestive. 



The sadly abused term "chemical engi- 

 neer" may even yet be rescued from dis- 

 aster and placed where it belongs, de- 

 scribing that adequately trained chemist 

 who is capable of applying chemistry where 

 construction work and operation are re- 

 quired. The chemist who is an engineer 

 has much to answer for, and when I use 

 the term I mean the one who is at least as 

 much a chemist as he is an engineer, and 

 not merely an engineer who, by contact 

 with chemists or laboratories, has picked 



up a vague idea of chemical methods and 

 problems. Engineering is extremely at- 

 tractive to the yoimger chemist on account 

 of its spectacular works and there is a little 

 danger of his over-estimating it as a pro- 

 fession and under-estimating his own. 

 This attitude will easily be outgrown with 

 age, but that it is a factor in diverting men 

 from the serious study of chemistry after 

 leaving the university is unquestionable. 

 Great are the works of the chemical engi- 

 neer, but even greater the opportunities. 

 I shall try to indicate what I consider some 

 of them. 



The chemical engineers have let go and 

 are still letting go many opportunities. 

 They have allowed the civil and the 

 mechanical engineers to appropriate fields 

 peculiarly their own. For example, water 

 and sewage purification, fuels and smoke 

 consumption. They have allowed the en- 

 gineer, by his greater enterprise, to enter 

 and appropriate to a large extent many 

 kinds of chemical manufacture on the large 

 scale. By chemical manufacture I do not 

 mean the manufacture of chemicals such as 

 acids, alkalies and salts alone, but any 

 manufacture which is based upon chemical 

 change. Many of the very old industries 

 such as ceramics and metallurgy are pre- 

 eminently chemical industries, but it would 

 seem in many eases as though they were 

 conducted by engineers with the chemist 

 hired as an aid in a minor capacity. And 

 when I make this statement please under- 

 stand it is not a criticism of the engineer 

 but of the chemist. 



There may be some who will say, as I 

 have heard it said, that the problems con- 

 nected with the lines of work I have men- 

 tioned are more of a mechanical than a 

 chemical kind, or at least the chemical 

 problems connected therewith are less diffi- 

 cult of solution than the mechanical. It 

 seems equally foolish to make a claim of 



