820 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXVIII. No. 728 



.stead of the bards of olden times who were 

 paid by the war-lords to sing their praise 

 and to tell lies in prose and in rhyme, we 

 now have the modern newspaper. But 

 even if some newspapers are glad to have 

 a war on hand which increases their cir- 

 culation, they can no longer arouse en- 

 thusiasm since their war reporters with 

 their deadly kodaks take away all the bom- 

 bast from their descriptions and only pic- 

 ture stern, prosaic, nasty reality. 



Fortunately for us the study of explo-. 

 sives and engines of war has a broader in- 

 terest. In the same way as the deadliest 

 of poisons have become some of the most 

 valuable therapeutic agents, so have ex- 

 plosives and engines of war found their 

 most valuable applications in the arts of 

 peace. Nitro-cellulose or gun-cotton, one 

 of the most violent explosives, found im- 

 mediately its applications in surgery, later 

 on in the manufacture of celluloid and also 

 made possible the photographic film. 

 Shall I call your attention to the splendid 

 example of our fellow chemist, Nobel, who 

 with his valuable work on nitro-glycerine, 

 dynamite and similar explosives, has made 

 his discoveries and inventions incompar- 

 ably more useful in mining and in engi- 

 neering than in war, and thus created more 

 good than the harm they ever will do in 

 the art of killing. Noble, too, was one of 

 those who did not love war, and he showed 

 it when, after his useful life, he made of 

 his enormous but well-acquired fortune an 

 international bequest for furthering peace 

 and civilization. 



Shall I remind you of the time when 

 chemistry did not exist, when the only en- 

 couragement which was given to experi- 

 mental research was dictated by greed, that 

 tried to make gold and thus bribed the 

 skill of the alchemist? And yet what an 

 immense amount of knowledge was thus 

 accumulated! Knowledge which was 



afterwards utilized for the benefit of man- 

 kind. 



Let me remind you also, my friends and 

 fellow chemists, that our God-given mission 

 is to utilize our science for the welfare of 

 our whole race ; to develop and improve our 

 knowledge, our thoughts, our aspirations, 

 to lead to a better, a higher, a happier 

 race; a race where individual selfishness 

 and conceit shall not count a life by three 

 score and ten, but a race where an indi- 

 vidual and a nation are only considered 

 as temporary cells or groups of cells in 

 an everlasting organism that lives through 

 centuries and teons; and which shall keep 

 on improving and improving towards 

 higher and higher standards; unless igno- 

 rance, greed and selfishness make it un- 

 happier and unhappier, until finally it 

 finds a fitful and merciful annihilation and 

 perishes and follows the way of the dead 

 races of animals and plants that have only 

 left their traces on past geological periods, 

 and now proclaim to us that they were 

 not apt, not fit, not warranted to perpetu- 

 ate themselves. 



Gentlemen: I now have the pleasure of 

 introducing to you our distinguished fel- 

 low chemist, Mr. Hudson Maxim, an 

 American, who by his discoveries, his in- 

 ventions, by his originality of thought and 

 action, has shown over and over again that 

 he is most eminently qualified to treat the 

 subject of this evening. 



L. H. Baekeland 



THE WARFARE OF THE FUTURE "^ 



How will the battles of the future be 



fought? In our reasoning we are obliged 



to proceed from the simple to the complex, 



from what we know to what we would 



•Address before the New York Section of the 

 American Chemical Society at the rooms of the 

 Chemists' Club, 108 West 55th Street, on Friday 

 evening, October 9, 1908. 



