700 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXVI. No. 673 



actual work of manufacturing, instead of 

 merely using and transmitting traditions. 

 No branch of industry ui Germany need 

 want for such men— their numbers and use- 

 fulness are seen best from the fact that a 

 single great factory, the Badische AnUin 

 und Farbenfabrik, had in its employ one 

 hundred and fifty such chemists in 1900. 

 There can be no doubt in the mind of any 

 political economist that a country so thor- 

 oughly equipped with scientifically trained 

 chemists and with schools for developing 

 them mtist have an enormous advantage 

 over competitors that lack both or have 

 them only in lesser degree. But such men 

 can receive their final training at universi- 

 ties only from men who are investigators 

 in their branch of work: the critical atti- 

 tude of mind, the inspiration to originate, 

 the training to convert the new idea into 

 the new result can come only from men 

 who have thought for themselves and 

 worked out their own problems— from re- 

 search men in our universities. 



American universities are feeling the 

 pressure of a growing demand from our in- 

 dustries for such trained investigators, 

 and with this outside pressure and the 

 inner call to do our share toward the 

 elucidation of the great problems of 

 humanity the last years have also wit- 

 nessed a rapidly growing and insistent 

 demand for research men to till impor- 

 tant university positions; not every uni- 

 versity in recent times has been as success- 

 ful and fortunate as is the University of 

 Illinois in meeting this need ; indeed, there 

 is a very decided shortage of men of proved 

 ability to do and direct investigative work 

 in chemistiy, and we may well ask why this 

 should be so and what remedy we have for 

 such a condition in this country. Turning 

 only for a moment to chemical research as 

 it was here twenty- five years ago, the better 

 to understand present conditions, we find 

 at that time only here and there in our 



universities a man of note carrying on 

 systematic investigations in chemistry: 

 Remsen at Johns Hopkins, the Gibbses at 

 Tale and Harvard, Cooke, HiU, Jackson, 

 Morley, Long, Michael and Ward, only a 

 handful of men devoting their lives to 

 chemical research as an article of faith. 

 Universities at that time did not demand 

 that their chemistry professors should be 

 investigators, and they were, as a rule, in- 

 stead, technical experts, analytical chem- 

 ists—thorough, capable, honest men, but 

 engaged in as extensive and as profitable 

 commercial work as the head of any com- 

 mercial laboratory. As a matter of fact, 

 we had then practically only one real uni- 

 versity, devoted to graduate work as dis- 

 tinguished from college work, and that was 

 Johns Hopkins, our pioneer American uni- 

 versity; although, as stated, graduate and 

 research work were also carried on to some 

 extent at Harvard, Yale and a few other 

 places. The greatest recent impetus to all 

 branches of research, including chemistry, 

 came in this country, in my opinion, from 

 the founding of Clark University with re- 

 search as its chief and almost exclusive 

 field and from the founding, only two years 

 later, of the University of Chicago with its 

 strong graduate school, strong not only in 

 its faculty, but, unlike Clark, also in its 

 student body. By one great efi'ort at once 

 a great college as well as a university, its 

 founding stimulated the development of 

 the graduate schools in the older universi- 

 ties of the east which were also both col- 

 leges and graduate schools; the western 

 universities have more slowly strengthened 

 their graduate work or have just started to 

 give graduate instruction, that is, to do real 

 university work. "With the development of 

 our universities, in the last fifteen years of 

 eager growth, chemistry in this coimtry has 

 given us the work of men like Richards, of 

 Harvard, a second Stas on atomic weights, 



