646 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XIX. No. 486. 



lie evidently intended to protect home in- 

 dustries, but the bursar's checks have to 

 travel a long way now. It is not in the 

 least essential to my argument to diminish 

 the total amount to be accounted for, rather 

 let it be imagined that all the money now 

 invested in the buildings and equipments 

 of our universities has completely vanished, 

 and still we shall be able to find hundreds 

 of dollars ' worth for every dollar expended 

 on laboratories or scientific work. 



The duties or functions of laboratories 

 have always been, and properly are, two- 

 fold, to teach and to advance knowledge. 

 Some have been devoted exclusively to 

 teaching and others exclusively to research, 

 but the best balanced are undoubtedly 

 those which take up the full burden and 

 do both. The results along either line are 

 ample to justify my contention. Consider 

 what some of the discoveries made in labo- 

 ratories have been, and what they have 

 meant to civilization. It is not my inten- 

 tion to weary you with a list of several 

 hundred valuable discoveries, but rather 

 to call your attention to certain character- 

 istics possessed by them, not often enough 

 emphasized. First and foremost among 

 these characteristics must stand the fact 

 that, with scarcely an exception, those dis- 

 coveries which have been of the greatest 

 material benefit to society have been the 

 results of disinterested research in pure 

 science, complete and unconditional gifts 

 to the whole world. Brandt received noth- 

 ing for his discovery of phosphorus in 1669, 

 but after the lapse of a century and a half 

 it gave us those simple but indispensable 

 conveniences, matches. Valerius Cordus, 

 when he first made ether in 1540, and 

 Guthrie and Liebig, when they discovered 

 chloroform in 1831, got no rewards for 

 those godsends they were giving to suffer- 

 ing humanity. Such examples might be 

 multiplied, and they would all have that 



characteristic— they have been free gifts to 

 mankind. 



To my mind, at least, another class of 

 results is even more important than such 

 as these. I refer to the great and funda- 

 mental laws, principles and theories of our 

 sciences. For while the chance of financial 

 reward to the discoverer is practically 

 eliminated, they alone make possible the 

 far-reaching applications of science, and 

 assure us of a continuation of our advance, 

 by furnishing the firm working bases. 

 Who can estimate the value of Dalton's 

 atomic theory, and all the patient and 

 painstaking work involved in the determi- 

 nation of the atomic weights, for the mani- 

 fold chemical and allied industries, and 

 through them for us all 1 How much was 

 Faraday's discovery and study of the phe- 

 nomena of electrical induction worth, bear- 

 ing in mind that it made possible our dyna- 

 mos and motors? Scarcely an electrical, 

 measurement is made but what Ohm's law 

 is used in the calculation, yet how many 

 of us have stopped to think what an im- 

 mense saving of time and money is effected 

 daily by that simple formulation of his? 

 But once more there is danger of becoming 

 prolix with such a vista of apt examples 

 opened out before me. 



The reproach is sometimes made by those 

 who know little of science, that much of 

 the research work done is useless from the 

 practical point of view, and results only in 

 scientific curiosities. Such curiosities were 

 cerium and thorium at one time, but now 

 we have the Welsbach gas mantle. The 

 scientific curiosity of to-day is very apt to 

 become the household necessity of to-mor- 

 row. A friend once watched Faraday in 

 his laboratory for a while, and then asked 

 him of what use such work could be. 

 Faraday immediately replied with the 

 question, 'Of what use is a baby?' 



It is not impossible that the objection 

 might be raised that many of the newest 



