JUNE 28, 1901. ] 
ing need in London’s University equipment 
than a special school of electro-chemistry, 
fully equipped with its necessary expensive 
apparatus, and provided with an endowed 
and not overworked staff of professors, able 
to inspire and direct the studies and re- 
searches of a selected band of graduate stu- 
dents. The same deficiency is found in 
other branches of technology. Mining and 
metallurgy are provided for on what must 
be called a small scale at the Royal College 
of Science, and mineralogy also in two or 
three small classes elsewhere. But noth- 
‘ ing that can be called adequate exists for 
the technical education, at convenient cen- 
ters and hours, at low fees, of the swarm 
of mining and metallurgical engineers that 
London ought to be sending out to every 
part of the Empire. It deserves the at- 
tention of those who are interested in the 
great mining enterprises of South and West 
Africa, America and Australasia, whether 
the time has not come for the establish- 
ment of a distinct school of metallurgy and 
mining, with special reference, not to coal 
and iron and the conditions of Great Brit- 
ain, but to the products and needs of other 
climes. In applied chemistry, too, beyond 
the praiseworthy attempt at the Herold’s 
Institute (Bermondsey ) to deal with leather 
dyeing and tanning, practically nothing in 
the nature of a school of chemical tech- 
nology exists in the metropolis. London 
transcends every other city in the magni- 
tude and variety of the local industries de- 
pending on one chemical process or another. 
Besides its large interest in every branch 
of the clothing trade, in all the materials 
for construction, and in such specialties as 
the use of india rubber, London is the great- 
est center for all the applications of photog- 
raphy and the various lithographic pro- 
cesses still most incompletely taught and 
studied. It is, moreover, the largest cen- 
ter of gas manufacture, and hence the 
most extensive producer of coal-tar. At 
SCIENCE. 
1023 
present the valuable by-products of Lon- 
don’s gas works are for the most part only 
so far dealt with on the spot as to reduce 
the cost of their freight to other parts. 
Practically all the skilled and remunera- 
tive treatment of coal-tar products is left to 
Germany, to which conntry we export what 
is virtually the raw material of a most valu- 
able trade, from sheer lack of scientific 
knowledge of how to make the most of it. 
Apparently we are contented with this 
state of things, seeing that London has to 
this day no center of instruction in gas 
manufacture and the treatment of its by- 
products; nor any provision for systematic 
research into their possible developments. 
Even the immemorial London industry of 
tanning is falling behind. Hides are posi- 
tively beginning to be exported from Eng- 
land to New York to be tanned in the United 
States by new processes and sent back as 
leather to Leicester and Northampton. | It 
is probable that few, if any, investments 
would, in the largest sense, pay better than 
the establishment — possibly in east or 
south London—of a great school of chem- 
ical technology; and, if we turn from physics 
and chemistry to biology, we must notice 
that, whilst the Institute of Preventive 
Medicine studies bacteriology from the 
pathological standpoint, London has as yet 
no provision for instruction and research in 
its industrial side. One of the largest and 
most profitable of London industries de- 
pends on the bacteriological process of fer- 
mentation. The whole future of London’s 
food supply—to say nothing of its sewage dis- 
posal—is involved in the same question; and 
refrigeration, to name only one out of many 
applications, is already the nucleus ofa great 
industry. The most economical means of 
lowering temperature ona large scale, under 
commercial conditions, has become literally 
a matter of life or death in certain indus- 
tries. This knowledge can hardly be 
‘picked up’ at the works or in the office. 
