June 16, 1911] 



SCIENCE 



915 



Each one feared that his neighbor might 

 profit by his experience were it to become 

 known, never realizing that he must in the 

 end get much more in return than he gave. 

 There was but one of him, while there were 

 many of his neighbors. 



But in the thirteenth century there came 

 a change. One Koger Bacon, who from 

 his rare accomplishments and erudition 

 was called Doctor Mirabilis, and who firmly 

 believed in the existence of the philos- 

 opher's stone, was being tried at Oxford 

 for sorcery. To disprove the charges 

 against himself, he wrote a celebrated 

 treatise with a long Latin name, in which 

 he showed that phenomena which had been 

 attributed to supernatural agencies were 

 in fact due to common and natural causes. 

 He pointed out further in his brief, a pos- 

 sible distinction between what he called 

 theoretical alchemy, or work which could 

 advance the knowledge of natural phenom- 

 ena, and practical alchemy, or the striving 

 after immediately usable information. He 

 is to be regarded as the intellectual orig- 

 inator of experimental research, and by his 

 generous treatment of the knowledge 

 gained, gave to the movement the impetus 

 for which it had so long waited. The lim- 

 itations of this paper preclude my follow- 

 ing in any detail the development of chem- 

 istry through the succeeding centuries, but 

 it can be easily shown that just as knowl- 

 edge was sought after for its own sake, 

 and in proportion as there was free and 

 honest intercourse between the investiga- 

 tors of the time, just so rapidly was real 

 progress made. 



The course of human events has been 

 compared to a pendulum. We tend to 

 swing to extremes ; to go too far first in one 

 direction, and then in the other, when real 

 progress lies in the middle. The period of 

 alchemy represents the pursuit of science 

 for selfish and sordid ends; its sole object 



was that of making gold. The pendulum 

 was at one extreme of its path. But at 

 that time, as at this, the making of gold by 

 whatever means did not in itself bring 

 happiness or contentment, or even success. 

 With the appearance of men who took an 

 absorbing interest in the study of natural 

 phenomena, for the purpose of gaining a 

 deeper insight into the world around them, 

 when investigations were undertaken from 

 a desire to know, and to acquire knowledge 

 which could become the property of the 

 world at large, the pendulum began to 

 move back. 



For years the efforts of investigating 

 minds were devoted to the explanation of 

 the phenomena of nature; to the discovery 

 of new laws and principles ; to the accumu- 

 lation and organization of facts, into what 

 is called a science — to a real search for 

 truth. This resulted in a general uplift 

 of humanity, an advance in civilization, 

 which can not be described or measured in 

 words. It was a time when the human 

 mind was struggling to determine realities 

 in the midst of tradition and superstition; 

 to realize that nature is always complex 

 but never mysterious; that dependence 

 should be placed in proven facts rather 

 than the vagaries of priests and philos- 

 ophers. Man became intellectually free. 



But for many years after the broad gen- 

 eralizations upon which modern chemistry 

 is founded were well established, industry 

 did not profit much by scientific work. 

 One hundred years ago the men who 

 smelted the iron and copper, the lead and 

 zinc, knew little of the principles under- 

 lying their practise. Leather was tanned, 

 woolens and silks were dyed, porcelains 

 and glass were made, without the aid of 

 those who alone knew the chemistry in- 

 volved. These were times when the ad- 

 vance in chemical knowledge was far ahead 

 of the industries on the success of which 



