November 22, 1907] 



SCIENCE 



705 



which left an impression upon the class, 

 were those with hydrogen and oxygen 

 which some of the students prepared for 

 the professor while he was out of the 

 lecture room. And I think I am not doing 

 the kindly professor an injustice when I 

 say I firmly believe that these experiments 

 were the first to leave lasting impression 

 upon him. Not a word in that whole 

 course in chemistry was said which con- 

 veyed to the minds of the students the idea 

 that chemistry was for any other purpose 

 than to be simply dabbled with in college 

 laboratories; not a word was said which 

 conveyed to the minds of the students the 

 fact that the laws and principles which we 

 were studying were the foundation stones 

 of our great ipdustrial structures; not a 

 word which impressed upon us the fact that 

 we were studying the very substances from 

 which our own bodies are made, from which 

 the whole universe is made; not a word 

 concerning the possibilities of the new 

 chemistry; not a word which would indi- 

 cate that there was anythrag more in the 

 whole realm of chemistry than that found 

 within the covers of a small elementary 

 text. My surprise was all the greater when 

 a few years later, I sat before a man with a 

 thorough knowledge of industrial and 

 practical chemistry. 



The above is a fair sample, I think, of 

 the methods of teaching chemistry in a ma- 

 jority of our state universities twenty-five 

 years ago. In fact, very little progress 

 had apparently been made since the intro- 

 duction of laboratory work into the United 

 States some twenty-five or thirty years 

 earlier. In 1850 there were, so far as I 

 can learn, only four or five institutions in 

 the country which could boast of a chemical 

 laboratory, and these were equipped in the 

 most primitive way. Tale College had a 

 small laboratory barely large enough to ac- 

 commodate a dozen students. Amherst 



had just opened a small laboratory and 

 Lawrence Scientific School likewise had a 

 very imperfect one. There were, perhaps, 

 two or three other institutions which had 

 so-called chemical laboratories. There 

 were, however, no systematic courses of 

 study such as we find in our universities 

 to-day, and no courses in applied and in- 

 dustrial chemistry. Students who were de- 

 sirous of a systematic study of chemistry 

 and more especially along technical lines, 

 were forced to go abroad. With the ex- 

 ception of these few institutions the teach- 

 ing of chemistry was entirely didactic. It 

 is not surprising, therefore, that little or 

 no progress should have been made during 

 the next twenty or thirty years in the 

 teaching of chemistry. 



I do not mean to say that there were no- 

 great teachers of chemistry during these 

 pioneer days. Such a statement would be 

 incorrect, for there were men who stood 

 out in chemistry during the fifties, sixties 

 and seventies, as prominently in our own 

 country as Liebig and Wohler did in Ger- 

 many during the early part of the century. 

 Such men as Silliman and Cook stood out 

 preeminently during the fifties and sixties, 

 while men like Elliott, Remsen, Chandler, 

 Morley, Mabery, Mallet and others have 

 given the institutions with which they were 

 connected such a standing as to place them 

 on the same plane with the older institu- 

 tions of Europe. 



In this early epoch, practically none of 

 the state universities of the center and 

 middle west had reached a point where 

 they could offer to the student good prac- 

 tical courses in chemistry. One reason, I 

 think, was a lack of well-trained teachers, 

 but the chief reason was doubtless an eco- 

 nomic one. The state universities turned 

 out few skilled chemists because there was 

 no demand for such men in the center and 

 middle west. The great industrial institu- 



