April 26, 1918] 



SCIENCE 



407 



amounted to five and one half million tons, 

 an increase over 1916 of over 600,000 tons. 

 Now recall that all of the nitration proc- 

 esses above referred to in the methods of 

 manufacture of explosives employ nitric 

 acid primarily and also sulfuric acid as an 

 accessory to the deed, as the lawyers 

 might say, and the further fact that a total 

 of over two billion pounds are made per 

 year at the present time. This is nearly 

 300 times the output in 1913 and over half 

 of it is exported. Now the question is, 

 "What sort of apparatus can stand up in 

 use under the action of these acids, espe- 

 cially in the manufacture of these enormous 

 quantities of explosives 1" The answer has 

 been worked out and can be fairly well read 

 in the advertisements in the chemical journ- 

 als of "Duriron," "Tantiron." "Buflo- 

 cast" and so forth. Five years ago we 

 were familiar with what by comparison 

 might be termed toy samples of apparatus 

 made from this material. To-day the mag- 

 nitude of the apparatus made takes on 

 really huge proportions. One might al- 

 most say that some of them would house 

 a coach and four. We can now under- 

 stand, I think, a remark made at the second 

 Exhibition of the Chemical Industries held 

 in New York in 1916. A professor in one 

 of our oldest universities in passing by the 

 various exhibits, stopped in front of the 

 display showing the various forms of Dur- 

 iron. After a moment's pau.se he remarked 

 impressively, "Ah! it is this which has 

 saved England." 



And so we might go on almost ad in- 

 finitum. But the time would fail me to tell 

 of magnesite, an essential for high tem- 

 perature furnace linings, formerly all im- 

 ported from Austria and Hungary, now 

 protluced in California and Washington 

 more than enough for our own needs. Of 

 rare and unusual chemicals such as dime- 

 thylglyoxene, heretofore only "made in 



Germany," an indispensable reagent for 

 analytical work with nickel steels, of photo- 

 graphic materials, of remedial agents and 

 synthetic drugs such as novocaine, a local 

 anesthetic of great value : of thermometers 

 and graduated ware, of glassware and por- 

 celain equal to the best of former importa- 

 tions. The chemists of the country seem to 

 have been awake at the switch and I think 

 we must agree that they have been singu- 

 larly effective in their work. 



I would like to discuss for a moment 

 some of the underlying causes which I be- 

 lieve have been of fundamental importance 

 and largely responsible for this effective- 

 ness. The mere enumeration of the above 

 items is informalaonal and may even be in- 

 teresting, at least to the chemists, but to 

 my mind it should serve an additional pur- 

 pose of even greater importance. It seems 

 to me therefore that we may well devote the 

 few minutes remaining to pointing a moral 

 and making the attempt at least of furnish- 

 ing a little adornment to the tale. 



The great underlying fact which must 

 be evident to any one who digs but a little 

 way below the surface in seeking an explan- 

 ation for the success of the chemists is this : 

 The most pronounced advancements of the 

 art, the real achievements, that have, with 

 such seeming readiness and almost as if by 

 calculation promoted these strikingly suc- 

 cessful results have been brought about by 

 men of thorough training in the purely 

 scientific principles of their art. Here in 

 the universities of the country has been 

 going on in a quiet way for fifteen or 

 twenty years past a type of preparedness 

 which I believe may be worth our while to 

 study. 



The method of training the chemist is 

 almost uniformly on the principle that if 

 you are going to make a scientist in the 

 field of chemistry, then surely he must 

 know the science of chemistry and if you 



