10 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXXII. No. 809 



ADDRESS AT AVNVAL BANQUET OF THE 

 AMERICAN CHEMICAL SOCIETY '^ 

 It is a pleasure and an inspiration to be 

 present at a gathering of so many men de- 

 voted to the advancement of the great science 

 of chemistry. The striking growth in the 

 numbers of your society in recent years typi- 

 fies the growing interest in the science and 

 the growing appreciation of its importance in 

 the industrial life of the nation. Many think 

 that the twentieth century will be preeminently 

 the century of the chemist; that as the nine- 

 teenth century was marked mainly by the 

 triumphs of physics — the development of steam 

 and gas engines, of electricity as a means of 

 power and of communication — so this century 

 will be signalized by applications of chemistry 

 that will once more thrust us into an entirely 

 new world. There seems indeed to be some 

 good ground for such an expectation. Already 

 great things have been accomplished — as we 

 see by a glance at our cotton industries, dye 

 works and countless other interests that chem- 

 istry has revolutionized. But there is no feel- 

 ing of having worked out the lode; the possi- 

 bilities of the future seem almost infinite and 

 all our hopes are high. We must, however, 

 never allow ourselves to lose sight of the fact 

 that we shall certainly fail unless we keep 

 industry in the closest possible touch with 

 science. The awful example, the standing 

 warning in this respect is of course the case 

 of England. There, a few years ago, they cele- 

 brated the fiftieth anniversary of an English 

 chemist's epoch-making discovery of mauve, 

 and yet the jubilee in honor of this man of 

 science was the occasion of the funeral oration 

 of the color industry in his own country. 

 This deplorable result was brought about en- 

 tirely by two things that are closely related — 

 first, the failure to keep industry in close 

 touch with science, and second, the impatience 

 of the manufacturer and his narrowness as a 

 self-styled " practical " man. The practical 

 Englishman is too apt to be impatient of the 

 slow processes of research. He wants to be 

 compensated in hard cash and at once. The 



'By Richard C. Maclaurin, Sc.D., LL.D., presi- 

 dent of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 



German, on the other hand, has learned to be 

 no less practical, but he has retained the tradi- 

 tions of a race of idealists plodding patiently 

 and surely to success. Now I need hardly say 

 to you that it is not wise for us to spend much 

 time in bemoaning or still worse in jeering at 

 England in this matter. Let us look to our- 

 selves. We are not, I think, specially remark- 

 able for patience, and I doubt very much 

 whether we are doing all that can be done to 

 keep industry and science in the closest pos- 

 sible touch. 



But the field of industrial chemistry is not 

 the only one in which the times are critical 

 and exacting. This is equally true of the 

 pure science itseK. I hope my own predilec- 

 tion for physics does not mislead me into 

 thinking that the most conspicuous develop- 

 ment of chemistry during the past quarter of 

 a century has been on the physical side; but 

 in any case there can be no question that the 

 artificial boundaries between physics and 

 chemistry are being rapidly removed, and of 

 course it is well to have it frequently brought 

 home to us that all such boundaries are purely 

 artificial. A disturbance in one field is sure 

 sooner or later to extend to the other. In 

 physics we have had a veritable earthquake 

 which has shaken the whole structure to its 

 foundations, and I understand that not a few 

 of the chemists have been so much impressed, 

 not so much by the actual shaking of the 

 building as by the cries of the expectant vic- 

 tims, that they are beginning to run. I would 

 exhort such people to be calm, and not be too 

 ready to throw away conceptions (such, e. g., 

 as that of an atom), conceptions that have 

 proved very valuable as aids to the advance- 

 ment of the science in the past. It is true, 

 of course, that the poor old atom has been a 

 great deal battered in its history — even in the 

 short time since the famous examinee de- 

 scribed it as " a square block of wood first 

 constructed by Dr. Dalton." It has been at 

 one time a hard inelastic sphere, again a piil- 

 sating spherical shell, at another time simply 

 a hole in the ether, or a vortex ring, some- 

 times it has appeared like a member of the 

 British House of Lords — a mere center of in- 



