October 22, 1915] 



SCIENCE 



549 



Would you take it amiss if I made a di- 

 gression from my subject as an answer to 

 repeated attacks which have been made of 

 late by some shortsighted men who blame 

 our increasing scientific knowledge in gen- 

 eral and our chemical science in particular, 

 for the excesses of the present European 

 war? 



But let us turn our attention to more 

 peaceful chemical pursuits and more par- 

 ticularly to the chemists of this country. 



Their work is difficult to understand and 

 still more difficult to be appreciated by the 

 uneducated or uninitiated ; nor do chemists 

 court the plaudits of an ignorant public 

 that can not understand them; they feel 

 fully compensated by the results of their 

 work if it only meets with the approval of 

 a few of their fellow chemists, irrespective 

 whether it brings them financial results or 

 not; in fact, most chemists are so much in 

 love with their work that very often they 

 neglect the financial side, to their own im- 

 mediate detriment. 



Unlike the physician, lawyer, clergyman, 

 actor, writer, artist or business man, the 

 chemist does not depend on the public at 

 large ; he is either engaged in some private 

 enterprise or he acts in a consulting capac- 

 ity for a few people, or he is teaching in 

 some educational institution. Popularity 

 in the usual sense has little or no value for 

 the chemist. 



No wonder then that the chemists of this 

 country, numerous and active as they are, 

 have hardly been noticed among the daily 

 noise of newspaper sensation and shriek- 

 ing publicity — no more than a skillful 

 Watchmaker would be noticed among the 

 hammering of a busy steam-boiler-manu- 

 facturing plant. 



■ And yet, right here in the United States, 

 the chemical profession has taken such a 

 root, such a development during the later 

 years, that our national American Chem- 



ical Society, which counts over 7,000 mem- 

 bers, has by far the largest membership of 

 any chemical society in the world, with all 

 due respect to England, France and Ger- 

 many; a society which finds it possible to 

 spend yearly over $100,000 on its three 

 chemical publications, copies of which are 

 to be found all over the world in every well- 

 equipped scientific library. Nor is the 

 study of chemistry in this country a matter 

 of recent occurrence. Our European 

 friends are astonished when we tell them 

 that as far back as 1792, there existed al- 

 ready the Chemical Society of Philadel- 

 phia, which was probably the first chemical 

 society ever organized in the world; some 

 of the papers presented at the meetings of 

 that early scientific body furnish even to- 

 day very interesting reading. Some of our 

 American educational institutions equipped 

 chemical laboratories for students at a time 

 when exceedingly few of the best-known 

 universities possessed any such facilities. 

 In fact, the Rensselaer Polytechnic Insti- 

 tute of Troy, New York, established a chem- 

 ical laboratory at about the same time as 

 was founded the famous laboratory of 

 Liebig, at the University of Giessen, 1825, 

 and the movement for the establishment of 

 laboratories in the United States was inde- 

 pendent of that in Europe. 



Nor should we overlook the fact that not- 

 withstanding the essentially pragmatic 

 tendencies of our country, the United 

 States has given to the world a Willard 

 Gibbs, who out-theorized existing chemical 

 theories and whose mathematical deductions 

 are still, after his death, furnishing food 

 for profound thought to the most renowned 

 physical chemists of Europe to whom they 

 have opened entirely new fields in the study 

 of chemical dynamics. 



I mention this more particularly for the 

 reason that our aniline-dye-consumers have 

 taken the chemists of the United States 



