June 3, 1910] 



SCIENCE 



851 



Even if you have the best qualified re- 

 search chemists, do not expect immediate 

 results. Do not forget that problems, ap- 

 pearingly most simple, require consider- 

 able time before they are thoroughly 

 studied. Even in successful cases, it may 

 easily require many, many years before a 

 subject is so thoroughly elucidated that it 

 can be taken up in practise. 



Research is what gives a young man of 

 strong individuality a chance to compete 

 with those big industrial consolidations, 

 the trusts, who, like elephants, look more 

 imposing by their size than by their agility 

 or perfection, and who, as that pachyderm, 

 have many vulnerable spots, and are just 

 as much handicapped by their lack of 

 flexibility and by their ponderosity. Some 

 steel manufacturers may be unable to 

 think about anything but tonnage, and yet 

 the work of some chemists has already in- 

 dicated that the quality of steel of the 

 future, or of its alloys, may be improved 

 to such a degree that probably the average 

 steel of to-day will look to our children as 

 brittle and imperfect as pig iron appears 

 to us. Neither should we lose sight of the 

 fact that even to the most exclusive me- 

 chanical enterprises there is a chemical 

 side, although the importance of the latter 

 may not be apparent to the man who is not 

 a chemist. 



Let me give also a warning to such man- 

 ufacturers who try to secure only by uncom- 

 promising secrecy, the money-making end 

 of their industries. 



As far as my experience goes, exag- 

 gerated secrecy is very often an indication 

 of lack of knowledge, of industrial feeble- 

 ness and incompetency; a miser is most of 

 the time a man of small means. 



If the chemists had been holding their 

 resiiLts from each other, we should still be 

 in the dark ages of the alchemist. No 

 secrecy, however jealously carried out, can 



outweigh enlightened research work, pro- 

 tected by wise patent legislation. If our 

 patent laws do not protect enough, then 

 our prime duty becomes to change them 

 until they answer their purpose as defined 

 by the constitution of the United States. 

 The care with which patent laws are ad- 

 ministered is a direct measure of the in- 

 dustrial importance of a country. Piracy 

 can not flourish, neither on the seas nor in 

 intellectual property, if ethics of justice 

 and equity can be made to prevail. 



Every recorded success of the scientist 

 or the engineer is an additional evidence 

 that ignorant greed and brutal rapacity 

 can not forever have full sway in this 

 world, and tliat the rule of the sly and the 

 shy leads to the abortion of progress. 

 Furthermore, the results of their work, 

 which bars out "chance," "luck" or 

 "happenings," is their most eloquent 

 language to convince their fellow men that 

 if law-makers may still think that laws are 

 made or unmade by them in Albany or 

 Washington or Harrisburg, there is at least 

 one law which can not be amended; at 

 least one law which even the cleverest law- 

 yers can not make to be interpreted in two 

 different ways ; a law which rules all men, 

 large or small, poor or rich, to whatever 

 nation they may belong ; a law which rules 

 the dead, and the unborn as well as the liv- 

 ing; a law which requires no supreme 

 court to test its validity; a law that can 

 not be trifled with, which nobody and 

 nothing can escape: the great unchange- 

 able Law of Nature which rules the uni- 

 verse, mocks at men-made statutes and 

 ordinances, and upsets and destroys 

 everything which comes in conflict with 

 her; the rigidly enforced law which tries 

 to teach us our mistakes by suffering, by 

 misery, by industrial or political crisis, by 

 unhappiness, by war, so as to awaken us 

 from our ignorant sleep, to show us our 



