OCTOBEB 2, 1908] 



SCIENCE 



451 



mand the cordial approval of the people and 

 therefore of congress, (4) it withdraws to an 

 appreciable degree the energies of the bureaus 

 undertaking it from the attack of a class of 

 problems that demand a sort of investigation 

 which other organizations or individuals have 

 been unable or unwilling to give. The ques- 

 tion of atomic weights has been selected as 

 typical of a class of scientific inquiries, for the 

 reason that the work done in that direction by 

 the Bureau of Standards is of the highest 

 character and the argument in favor of its 

 inclusion in the scope of bureau activities is 

 the strongest that can be brought in behalf of 

 any scientific work of the category to which it 

 belongs. It is, however, not a question, as I 

 apprehend it, of whether this bureau can do 

 such work well, but rather of whether any 

 bureau should do it at all. 



The reply is obvious, that, if the public does 

 not approve of the government doing such 

 work it is because the public does not under- 

 stand it; therefore educate the public, but do 

 not stop the work. It is possible, however, 

 that the public understands the wider bearings 

 of the questions involved very well, although 

 not very familiar with details. Every one of 

 the bureaus doing scientific work was organ- 

 ized explicitly and absolutely for utilitarian 

 purposes. Every argument used before the 

 congress to secure appropriations needed for 

 organization and maintenance was based on 

 the direct practical usefulness of the bureaus 

 to the commerce and industries of the country 

 and to the transaction of the business of the 

 government itself. Those arguments are 

 looked upon by the people at large as pledges, 

 and in my opinion it is right that it should 

 be so. The utilitarian aim should be first. 

 It can not be doubted that, if this aim is 

 conscientiously kept in mind, incidentally 

 much that possesses a wider scientific interest 

 will be brought out, in the end as much per- 

 haps as if the aim had been primarily scien- 

 tific in the narrower sense. After all, it 

 should not be forgotten that the industries 

 have contributed no less to the sciences than 

 the sciences to the industries. 



In any event, raising the question whether 

 and how the Bureau of Standards may be 



made still more useful to those engaged in the 

 technical or scientific practise of chemistry, 

 ought not — and I am sure will not — be con- 

 strued as a reflection upon the valuable work 

 done by it in the past. 



The same reasons which have made it neces- 

 sary to supply the industries with oificial 

 standards of weight and of volume make it 

 desirable that chemical standards should also 

 be furnished for those industries which are 

 dependent upon chemical processes. It is 

 scarcely to be assumed that the chemical 

 laboratories devoted to commercial technical 

 work should in all or most instances command 

 the time or the skill to establish their own 

 standards. Such laboratories employ methods 

 of analysis that yield results reasonably con- 

 cordant among themselves, but that are not 

 necessarily in conformity with absolute 

 standards nor with those obtained by other 

 laboratories of the same type. In a word, the 

 methods are, to a certain degree, empirical. 

 This is a fact not subject to control. It is 

 conditioned by the nature of the work and 

 must as such be reckoned with. It is an evil 

 which constantly gives rise to friction between 

 buyer and seller, between manufacturer and 

 consumer. A remedy for this evil which has 

 repeatedly been and still is advocated is the 

 introduction of uniform methods of analysis. 

 This remedy is, however, both inadequate and 

 dangerous. Inadequate, because it is impos- 

 sible so to specify every step of an analytical 

 process as to secure with certainty identical 

 execution and identical results from it at the 

 hands of workers in diiierent laboratories. 

 Dangerous, because it hampers the develop- 

 ment of improved methods and tends to make 

 a mere machine of the technical chemist. A 

 better remedy is at hand. This is, to place at 

 the disposal of all laboratories interested, 

 chemicals which are officially standardized, so 

 that by whatever process a given chemist 

 operates, he may check his results by the 

 standard material, just as he now checks his 

 thermometers or his weights through the aid 

 of the Bureau of Standards. He will thus, if 

 his methods are bad, soon discover the fact 

 and abandon them; if they are concordant 

 among themselves, but not with the absolute 



