April 8, 1904.] 



SCIENCE. 



575 



The college laboratory is totally different 

 from a factory. Any student can make 

 aa ounce of a material, but when it comes 

 to multiplying that by three thousand 

 technical education is necessary. 



Peofessoe M. T. Bogert. 



It appears to me that the employers of 

 technical chemists really want two kinds of 

 chemists. In the first place, they need 

 what may be called technical directors; 

 men who are trained more thoroughly on 

 the mechanical side than on the chemical 

 side ; who understand the handling of both 

 men and machinery and who know in a 

 general way the chemical processes to be 

 carried out; and secondly, scientifically 

 educated chemists. The training of these 

 two classes of chemists, it seems to me, is 

 quite different. The man who has to do 

 with a particular chemical problem and 

 work it out in the laboratory needs a very 

 thorough and highly specialized training 

 in chemistry. Engineering is not neces- 

 sary. The value of the results accom- 

 plished have been placed too much, in my 

 opinion, to the credit of the technical di- 

 rector. The man who is working in the 

 laboratory, the man behind the guns, is 

 the man who has accomplished results in 

 Germany as well as in this country. I 

 think the progress in Germany in technical 

 chemistry has been due largely to the work 

 in the research laboratories by men who 

 have no engineering training, and I plead 

 with the employers for recognition of the 

 work of the men in the laboratories and 

 for greater patience in their dealings with 

 them, and for a more enlightened policy in 

 establishing research laboratories, for, in 

 my opinion, it is only through such estab- 

 lishments that the American chemist can 

 hope to compete with the German chemist. 



Mr. W. H. Nichols. 



The young man who goes to college to 

 get his technical training should determine 



whether he is going to use it in the realm 

 of pure research or whether he is going to 

 be a chemical engineer. The mechanical 

 engineer can not take the place of the chem- 

 ical engineer, as he goes to the other ex- 

 treme. "VVe have already the purely sci- 

 entific chemist and the engineer; between 

 the two we have the technical chemist or 

 chemical engineer and there is plenty of 

 opportunity for him. 



It should be remembered in this con- 

 nection that a college course is simply a 

 foundation, on which the further education 

 is to be built in after life; for it is not 

 possible to furnish the thoroughly edu- 

 cated man in four or even in five years. 



SCIENTIFIC BOOKS. 

 Skew Frequency Curves in Biology and 

 Statistics. By J. 0. Kapteyn, ScD., Pro- 

 fessor of Astronomy at Groningen. Pub- 

 lished by the Astronomical Laboratory at 

 Groningen. Groningen, P. NoordhofE. 

 1903. 



This paper is almost unique in that it at- 

 tempts to be at once a popular presentation 

 of statistical methods and a mathematical 

 derivation of a new theory regarding skew 

 frequency curves, thus attempting to ' bene- 

 fit all students of statistics ' by his ideas. It 

 is only necessary for the non-mathematical 

 reader to take his mathematics for granted 

 and apply the formulae deduced, while the 

 mathematician need not waste much time over 

 the first ten paragraphs. 



The author mentions how Francis Galton 

 has shown that important biological conclu- 

 sions may be derived from a discussion of the 

 normal curve, and deplores the fact that most 

 of these deductions can not be extended to the 

 skew curves of Quetelet and Pearson. This, 

 he says, is due to the purely empirical nature 

 of these curves; they furnish a mechanical 

 representation of the data without having any 

 real and vital relation to them. The ad- 

 vantages claimed for the new theory are : "(a) 

 It assigns the connection between the form of 

 the curves and the action of the causes to 



