August 28, 1896.] 



SCIENCE. 



265 



upon the address of M. Berthelot, as President 

 of the International Congress of Applied Chem- 

 istry, recently in session in Paris. It is of in- 

 terest in this country, not only as showing the 

 present attitude of thinking Englishmen in re- 

 gard to the encouragement of research, but be- 

 cause the reproaches which the English editor 

 showers upon his own country are at least 

 equally applicable in the United States, perhaps 

 more so : 



' ' He was addressing the generals of this new 

 army of science, who, in the rivalries of their 

 nations, count for more than hosts of armed 

 men. England, to defend her vast and scat- 

 tered interests, attempts to keep her navy 

 equal to the combined navies of any two for- 

 eign powers. How in this scientific review did 

 she compare ? The figures are so startling and 

 so omnious that we give them all : from Austria, 

 157 ; from Germany, 102 ; from Belgium, 53 ; 

 from Russia, 37 ; from Peru, 35 ; from Portu- 

 gal, 25 ; from Brazil, 25 ; from Mauritius, 24 ; 

 from Holland, 23 ; from the United States, 20 ; 

 from Spain, 19 ; from Switzerland, 13 ; from 

 Egypt, 12 ; from Italy, 10 ; from England and 

 from Greece, 8 ; from Roumania, 7 ; from Cuba, 

 Mexico and the Argentine, 4 ; from Denmark 

 and Turkey, 1. Repeat it, ponder it ! From 

 England, 8 ; from Austria, 157 ; from Germany, 

 102. We will warrant that the Rev. Dr. Lunn 

 got more Englishmen to attend his Swiss Con- 

 ference on Arbitration ! The worst of it is 

 that we have little doubt but that the numbers 

 represent fairly the relative interests in techni- 

 cal chemistry in the different countries, espe- 

 cially if allowance be made for convenience of 

 access to Paris, the place of conference. For 

 the present we cannot enter at length into the 

 causes and possible remedies for this national 

 folly. But we may point out that vast sums 

 are annually wasted on chemistry in England. 

 The Science and Art authorities at South Ken- 

 sington, and the Technical Instruction authori- 

 ties of the County Councils, spend largely upon 

 chemical subjects. But, for the most part, the 

 money is spent upon teaching of chemistry, not 

 upon chemical research. It may be a valuable 

 addition to national character that a large num- 

 ber of children be taught the elements of water 

 and the composition of coal gas. But it is an 



indisputable fact that ninety per cent, of these 

 children do not proceed beyond the luxury of 

 superfluous elementary knowledge ; and that 

 of the remaining ten, at least nine become 

 themselves elementary teachers. Teaching is 

 a trade in England ; research is not ; and,- un- 

 til the endowment of research is recognized as 

 a million times more important than the diffu- 

 sion of cheap knowledge, England will continue 

 on the downward path." 



'squirting' iron and steel and other 



METALS'. 



One of the most remarkable and unexpected 

 developments in the recent progress of manu- 

 factures of metal is described by Mr. Nursey in 

 a paper recently presented, at the Spring Meet- 

 ing, to the Iron and Steel Institute of Great 

 Britain. This is a process of ' squirting ' bars 

 of all the metals in a manner similar in principle 

 to the old and familiar process of manufacture 

 of lead pipe. It is the invention of Mr. Alex- 

 ander Dick, long known as a practical metal- 

 lurgist, and especially in the work of introduc- 

 tion of various valuable alloys. 



Mr. Dick has discovered a way to make pos- 

 sible the production of all sections of metal bars 

 from the simple round wire to the most com- 

 plex designs, such as are quite impossible to 

 roll successfully, by raising the metal to be thus 

 formed to a high temperature, and thus to re- 

 duce it to the plastic state and then forcing it 

 from a reservoir through properly formed dies 

 under hydraulic pressure. His claim is that it 

 is commercially practicable to form bars of all 

 such sections by ' extrusion under pressure at 

 high temperatures. ' The temperature usually 

 adopted by him is approximately 1000° F. 



After a long and costly series of experiments, 

 the following system of construction of the ap- 

 paratus has been found to meet the require- 

 ments of the case successfully : A series of 

 concentric cylinders of tungsten steel are placed 

 one within another, separated by an intermedi- 

 ate space of about f of an inch ; which space is 

 filled with compressed non-conducting material. 

 This ' container ' is mounted on trunnions and 

 fitted with a worm-gear arrangement for swing- 

 ing it in the vertical plane, like a Bessemer 

 Converter. The die plates are made of tung- 



