October 26, 1900.] 



SCIENCE. 



641 



possess a very wide knowledge of what has 

 already been done in the past. He will 

 have little enthusiasm for his subject, and 

 will continue to teach on the lines laid 

 down by the text-books of the day, without 

 himself materially improving the existing 

 methods, and, above all, he will be unable, 

 and will have no desire, to add to our store 

 of knowledge by original investigation. 



It is in the power of almost every teacher 

 to do some research work, and it seems 

 probable that the reason why more is not 

 done by teachers is because the importance 

 of research work was not sufficiently in- 

 sisted on, and their original faculty was not 

 sufficiently trained, at the schools and col- 

 leges where they received their education. 



And these remarks apply with equal force 

 to the student who subsequently becomes a 

 technical chemist. 



In the chemical works of to-day sound 

 knowledge is essential, but originality is an 

 even more important matter. A technical 

 chemist without originality can scarcely 

 rise to a responsible position in a large 

 works, whereas a chemist who is capable of 

 constantly improving the process in oper- 

 ation, and of adding new methods to those 

 in use, becomes so valuable that he can 

 command his own terms. 



Now, this being so, I think it is extraor- 

 dinary that so many of the students who 

 go through the prescribed course of train- 

 ing — say for the Bachelor of Science degree 

 — not only show no originality themselves, 

 but seem also to have no desire at the con- 

 clusion of their studies to engage in orig- 

 inal investigation under the supervision of 

 the teacher. That this is so is certainly 

 my experience as a teacher examiner, and 

 I feel sure that many other teachers will 

 endorse this view of the case. 



If we inquire into the reason for this 

 deficiency in originality we shall, I think, 

 be forced to conclude that it is in a large 

 measure due to the conditions of study and 



the nature of the courses through which 

 the student is obliged to pass. 



A well-devised system of quantitative 

 analysis is undoubtedly valuable in teaching 

 the student accurate manipulation, but it 

 has always seemed to me that the long 

 course of qualitative analysis which is usu- 

 ally considered necessary, and which gen- 

 erally precedes the quantitative work, is 

 not the most satisfactory training for a 

 student. 



There can be no doubt that to many stu- 

 dents qualitative analysis is little more than 

 a mechanical exercise: the tables of sepa- 

 ration are learnt by heart, and every sub- 

 stance is treated in precisely the same 

 manner: such a course is surely not calcu- 

 lated to develop any original faculty which 

 the student may possess. Then, again, 

 when the student passes on to quantitative 

 analysis, he receives elaborate instructions 

 as to the little details he must observe in 

 order to get an accurate result ; and even 

 after he has become familiar with the sim- 

 pler determinations he rarely attempts, and 

 indeed has no time to attempt, anything of 

 the nature of an original investigation in 

 qualitative or quantitative analysis. It in- 

 deed sometimes happens that a student at 

 the end of his second year has never pre- 

 pared a pure substance, and is often utterly 

 ignorant of the methods employed in the 

 separation of substances by crystallization ; 

 he has never conducted a distillation, and 

 has no idea how to investigate the nature 

 and amounts of substances formed in chem- 

 ical reactions ; practically all his time has 

 been taken up with analysis. That this is 

 not the way to teach chemistry was cer- 

 tainly the opinion of Liebig, and in support 

 of this I quote a paragraph bearing on the' 

 subject which occurs in a very interesting 

 book on ' Justus von Liebig : his Life and 

 Work,' written by W. A. Shenstone (pp. 

 175, 176). 



" In his practical teaching Liebig laid 



