OCTOBEE 3, 1902.] 



SCIENCE. 



545 



developed the color industry. The patent 

 laws have only contributed in a secondary 

 degree, and if the patent laws have been 

 bad the reason for their badness is again 

 vi'ant of education. Make them as bad as 

 you choose, and you only prove that the 

 men who made them, and the public whom 

 these men try to please, were misled by 

 theories instead of being conversant with 

 fact and logic. But the root of the mis- 

 chief is not in the patent laws or in any 

 legislation whatever. It is in the want 

 of education among our so-called educated 

 classes, and secondarily among the work- 

 men on whom these depend. It is in the 

 abundance of men of ordinary plodding 

 ability, thoroughly trained and method- 

 ically directed, that Germany at present 

 has so commanding an advantage. It is 

 the faihire of our schools to turn out, and 

 of our manufacturers to demand, men of 

 this kind, which explains our loss of some 

 valuable industries and our precarious hold 

 upon others. Let no one imagine for a 

 moment that this deficiency can be rem- 

 edied by any amount of that technical 

 training which is now the fashionable 

 nostrum. It is an excellent tiling, no 

 doubt, but it must rest upon a foundation 

 of general training. Mental habits are 

 formed for good or evil long before men 

 go to the technical schools. We have to 

 hegin at the beginning: we have to train 

 the population from the first to think cor- 

 rectly and logically, to deal at first hand 

 vyith facts, and to evolve, each one for him- 

 self, the solution of a problem put before 

 lim, instead of learning by rote the solu- 

 tion given by somebody else. There are 

 plenty of chemists turned out, even by our 

 universities, who would be of no use to 

 Bayer & Co. They are ehockfuU of for- 

 muliE, they can recite theories, and they 

 know text-books by heart ; but put them to 

 solve a new problem, freshly arisen in the 

 laboratory, and you will find that their 



learning is all dead. It has not become a 

 vital part of their mental equipment, and 

 they are floored by the first emergence of 

 the unexpected. The men who escape this 

 mental barrenness are men who were some- 

 how or other taught to think long before 

 they went to the university. To my mind, 

 the really appalling thing is not that the 

 Germans have seized this or the other in- 

 dustry, or even that they may have seized 

 upon a dozen industries. It is that the 

 German population has reached a point of 

 general training and specialized equip- 

 ment which it will take us two generations 

 of hard and intelligently directed educa- 

 tional work to attain. It is that Germany 

 possesses a national weapon of precision 

 which must give her an enormous initial 

 advantage in any and every contest de- 

 pending upon disciplined and methodized 

 intellect. 



HISTORY OF COLD AND THE ABSOLUTE ZERO. 



It was Tyndall's good fortune to appear 

 before you at a moment when a fruitful 

 and comprehensive idea was vivifying the 

 whole domain of scientific thought. At 

 the present time no such broad generaliza- 

 tion presents itself for discussion, while on 

 the other hand the number of specialized 

 studies has enormously increased. Science 

 is advancing in so broad a front by the 

 efforts of so great an army of workers that 

 it would be idle to attempt within the 

 limits of an address to the most indulgent 

 of audiences anything like a survey of 

 chemistry alone. But I have thought it 

 might be instructive, and perhaps not un- 

 interesting, to trace briefly in broad out- 

 line the development of tliat branch of 

 study with which my own labors have been 

 recently more intimately connected— a 

 study which I trust I am not too partial in 

 thinking is as full of philosophical interest 

 as of experimental difficulty. The nature 

 of heat and cold must have engaged think- 



