Apbil 26, 1907] 



SCIENCE 



651 



than by the subject matter of his pedagogic 

 efforts. 



The chemist has another and more gen- 

 eral claim upon the community by reason 

 of the intellectual interest which his re- 

 searches add to life. Moissan extends the 

 range of our activities to the highest tem- 

 perature of the electric furnace, and we 

 produce within our laboratories the condi- 

 tions obtaining in the sun. Dewar brings 

 us within a few degrees of the absolute 

 zero. Bunsen and Kirchoff teach us the 

 composition of the stars. Avogadro and 

 Ampere picture to us the mechanism of 

 gases. Dalton supplies a hypothesis 

 which for almost a century suffices to ex- 

 plain the constitution of matter and the 

 course of chemical change. Curie opens 

 out new vistas in which the old thought is 

 seen in new relations, which give to the 

 universe, as we have known it, entirely new 

 aspects. 



Briefly and baldly as I have set forth 

 the claim on the community which chemists 

 may fairly make, it is, nevertheless, a 

 showing for which no apology is required. 

 There are perhaps as many as ten thousand 

 chemists in the country ; the census of 1900 

 gives 8,847 as contrasted with 125,000 law- 

 yers and 93,000 doctors. In the light of 

 these figures who shall say that the chemist 

 has not borne his part as should the happy 

 warrior in the fight against ignorance, ma- 

 terial obstacles and the phantasms of the 

 mind. 



So much at least the chemist has done 

 and may be counted on to do for the com- 

 munity; but this by no means ends his 

 obligation, if the profession as a class is to 

 attain its true success which is the achieve- 

 ment of the best of which it is capable in 

 its broadest relations to the community at 

 large. Dewar has said that the ' one great 

 object of the training of a chemist is to 

 produce an attitude of mind,' and Prin- 

 cipal Caird has defined the scientific habit 



of miud as 'the faculty of grasping the 

 universal element in all human knowledge. ' 

 Karl Pearson puts the same thing in a 

 slightly different way by saying "The sci- 

 entific man has above all things to strive 

 at self-elimination in his judgments, to 

 provide an argument which is as true for 

 each individual mind as for his own." 

 When we add to this the absolute honesty 

 toward himself and others and toward 

 things as well which should characterize 

 the chemist who has responded to his train- 

 ing and supplement the whole by precise 

 and special knowledge and the ability to do 

 the things within his sphere, we not only 

 have all the essentials of good citizenship, 

 but an ideal basis for leadership in the 

 great work of coordinating and utilizing 

 and making amenable to law the new 

 powers and resources and discoveries with 

 which the world is now congested. The 

 chemist from the very nature of his work 

 and training should be the unswerving 

 enemy of graft in every form. He should 

 not be content with a mere passive resist- 

 ance and a merely personal honesty, but 

 should take an active and aggressive part in 

 the fight against corruption and frauds, 

 whether these involve sea-water gold, salted 

 mines, corporation mismanagement or poli- 

 tics. He should more frequently be found 

 on school boards and boards of health and 

 special commissions, and I venture even to 

 suggest that chemical societies should far 

 more often act as a body or through com- 

 mittees to expose abuses or battle for their 

 remedy. Such conditions as prevailed for 

 years in the water supply of Philadelphia, 

 where they are not yet fully remedied and 

 which still prevail in many sections of our 

 country, the stagnation and inefficiency of 

 our patent office, the fraud on and danger 

 to the community involved in the methods 

 of some makers of proprietary medicines, 

 the petty graft which many manufacturers 

 of honest products meet with in their sale 



