April 8, 1904.] 



SCIENCE. 



573 



of instruction can be best spared? By 

 two of the speakers analytical chemistry 

 has been emphasized as especially impor- 

 tant, a subject to which already by far the 

 larger part of the available time is devoted 

 in most chemical courses. I myself con- 

 sider it a question whether this can not 

 be reduced to a considerable extent in the 

 case of chemists preparing for positions in 

 the works rather than the laboratory. An- 

 other question that may, perhaps, be 

 worthy of consideration is whether the 

 modern languages to which a very large 

 amount of time is devoted in most of the 

 college courses are actually made use of 

 to any considerable extent by manufactur- 

 ing chemists. 



PkofessOr H. p. Talbot. 



"We can not probably hope to transform 

 the student into a chemist and an engineer 

 in the same four years, but we can hope, I 

 think, to turn out a good chemist— a man 

 fundamentally trained, at any rate— and 

 at the same time to give him so much of 

 the fundamental principles of engineering 

 that he will at least knoAV what a mechan- 

 ical engineer is talking about and know 

 what he ought to be expected to do. That 

 is a good deal in itself. 



As to what shall be taken out of our 

 chemistry courses to make a place for these 

 other subjects, there must always be a cer- 

 tain amount of sincere difference of opin- 

 ion. While analytical chemistry is the 

 yard-stick by which the chemist generally 

 measures his practical attainments, it is 

 possible, I think, that we sometimes make a 

 mistake in teaching analytical chemistry 

 in a too abstract way. I am hopeful that, 

 as time goes on, we shall be able so to 

 arrange our courses that we can connect 

 analytical chemistry in the mind of the 

 student more closely with the scientific or 

 industrial problems to which it is to be 

 applied, and in this way can stimulate his 



interest and develop his ingenuity. If a 

 change of this sort will produce a grad- 

 uate with greater power to apply his knowl- 

 edge and technique promptly and prac- 

 tically, the time spent upon analytical 

 chemistry will be fully justified. 



Dr. Wm. Jay Schieffelin. 



I want to say a word in answer to the 

 questions which Dr. Noyes has put — first, 

 should less time be devoted to analytical 

 work; and second, are the languages im- 

 portant? 



Most of the industrial processes are 

 elaborations or applications of methods 

 used in analysis; therefore, the technical 

 chemist should know the methods. It is 

 very hard to-day to get a man who is a 

 good analyst, upon whose analysis you can 

 entirely rely. If he must make an analysis 

 which he has not made before, he takes a 

 book of selected methods and goes through 

 it, but his results are not satisfactory. I 

 think it is vitally important that the man 

 should be a trained analyst. It is the 

 hardest thing in the world to have a min- 

 eral accurately analyzed to-day and there 

 are very few men in the country who can 

 make an analysis of a new mineral from 

 which its formula can be deduced. But 

 what interests the chemist in the technical 

 laboratory is improvement in processes and 

 apparatus more than in minute accuracy 

 of results; moreover, in any technical 

 laboratory there are comparatively few 

 varieties of analyses being made. It seems 

 to me that the German language is im- 

 mensely important, because the German 

 works, Beilstein and Dammer, are to-day 

 the chemist's bibles, and contain nearly 

 everything on organic and inorganic chem- 

 istry which he wants to learn about, and 

 they haven't their parallel in the English 

 language. It is, therefore, very important 

 to have a knowledge of the German lan- 

 guage, and I do hope there will be no at- 



