January io, 1890.] 



SCIENCE. 



19 



the many and increasing chemical industries. England furnishes 

 nearly all the raw, formerly valueless, material for coal-tar colors, 

 out of which Germany made most of the seventeen and a half mil- 

 lion dollars' worth manufactured in 1880. England bought back 

 a large fraction of the colored goods, and Germany made the 

 profits, because she could furnish the best training in pure chem- 

 istry. It is for this reason that she is driving other countries out 

 of the field in other leading chemical industries. The great facto- 

 ries there employ from two or three to more than a score each of 

 good, and often the best, university-trained chemists, at large sala- 

 ries, and the best of these spend a good part of their time in origi- 

 nal research in the factory laboratories. -The prospect of these 

 lucrative careers has had very much to do in filling the chemical 

 laboratories of the universities with hundreds of students, and the 

 German government (best that of Prussia) has met the demand by 

 erecting and equipping new and sometimes magnificent laborato- 

 ries at nearly all of her universities. New artificial processes of 

 making organic products of commerce have freed thousands of 

 acres of land where they were formerly grown, and have made new 

 industries and often impaired old ones. Many professors of chem- 

 istry make large outside incomes. Nearly all are sanguine, some 

 even declare, that before very long leading drugs, and even food, 

 that will equal if not actually excel nature's products, will be made 

 artificially. The leading professor in one of the largest chemical 

 laboratories of Germany told me in substance that he no longer 

 went after outside technical work, but now made it a virtue to wait 

 for it to seek him ; and it has been strongly urged that even the 

 government should take steps to prevent the migration of German 

 chemists to the universities of other countries, lest Germany lose 

 her pre-eminence in chemical industries. 



This remarkable contact of the marvellous new business-life and 

 energy of Germany, particularly of North Germany (which in both 

 suddenness and vigor equals any of the wonderful developments in 

 this country), with staid and tranquil academic ways, has had 

 some marked reverberations, and given new direction and impetus 

 to other studies in some other departments where it is not' directly 

 felt. It has led to the erection and equipment by the government 

 of great technological schools, and has shown to business men and 

 employers that no course in the sciences which underlie tech- 

 nology can be too advanced, prolonged, or severe to be practical. 

 Where ought the value and significance of such a training be bet- 

 ter appreciated than here in the land of Fulton, Morse, Bell, and 

 Edison ? 



There are, however, eminent chemists in Germany, and many 

 more in surrounding European countries, who deplore what they 

 call the irruption of the technical spirit into the universities. They 

 fear the proximity of the factory and the patent office to the uni- 

 versity laboratory has narrowed the field of view and made meth- 

 . ods of research relatively less severe ; they complain that in their 

 teaching they must hasten over inorganic chemistry, neglecting all 

 the other elements for the carbon compounds, and that there 

 are almost no inorganic chemists in Germany ; that in choosing 

 between several substances inviting research, one of which prom- 

 ises great commercial value and the other none, strict scientific im- 

 partiality is lost ; that in the eagerness for practical results, prob- 

 lems are attempted too complex for the present methods of experi- 

 menters, who are trying to " eat soup with a fork," as one sadly 

 told me, and that thus, while published researches are more nu- 

 merous they are less thorough, and have introduced many formulae 

 that neither prove nor agree, so that much work now accepted must 

 be done over again and far more thoroughly ; that even Liebig set 

 a bad example in this respect, and that many new products, of 

 which university chemists boast, are so inferior to those of nature 

 as to be really adulteration. 



What I have tried to illustrate mainly in the field of one science 

 is more or less true under changed ways and degrees in the sphere 

 of others. The sciences are also at the very heart of modern med- 

 ical studies. Biology explores the laws of life, upon which not 

 only these studies but human health, welfare, and modern concep- 

 tions of man and his place in nature, so fundamentally rest. The 

 law of the specific energy of nerves, e.g., which Helmholtz says 

 equals in importance the Newtonian law of gravity, and more than 

 anything else made physiology the science which has had so large 



a share in raising the medical profession in Germany to a position 

 in the intellectual world such as it never had before, doing for it 

 in some degree what chemistry has done for dyeing; and even 

 instruments like the ophthalmoscope, which almost created a de- 

 partment of medical practice, or the spectroscope, now indispensa- 

 ble in tlie Bessemer process, in sugar refining, in wine and color- dye 

 tests, the detection of photographic sensibilators, in the custom- 

 house, and in two important forms of medical diagnosis, — all 

 these, to cut short a long list of both epoch-making laws and im- 

 portant instruments, are the direct products of whole-souled devo- 

 tion to unremunerative scientific research. 



It is hard for medical students to realize that they cannot under- 

 stand hygiene, forensic medicine, pharmacology, and toxicology 

 without a rigorous drill in chemistry ; that they must know physics 

 to understand the diagnostic and therapeutic use of electricity, 

 ophthalmology, otology, the mechanism of the bones, muscles, cir- 

 culation, etc. ; that zoology is needed to teach sound philosophic 

 thought, generic facts about the laws of life, health, reproduction, 

 and disease. These, and sometimes also sciences like mineralogy, 

 anthropology, and psychology, are required in Europe, with much 

 more rigor than is common with us, of every medical student. 

 Thus doctors, like technologists, cannot know too much pure sci- 

 ence. An eminent medical practitioner in Europe compares young 

 physicians who slight the basal sciences of their profession and 

 pass on to the clinical, therapeutic, and practical parts, to young 

 men who grow prematurely old and sterile. The phrase of Hip- 

 pocrates, " God-like is the physician who is also a philosopher," is 

 still more true and good in its larger, more modern, and looser 

 translation, viz., exalted is the physician who knows not only the 

 most approved methods of practice, but also the pure sciences 

 which underlie and determine both the dignity and the value of his 

 profession. 



Medical instruction, on the one hand, must select as its founda- 

 tion those sciences and those parts of the sciences most useful in 

 meeting man's great enemy, disease. It needs far more anat- 

 omy than physics, and little mathematics, astronomy, or geology. 

 Technical instruction, on the other hand, is and must be so organ- 

 ized as to reflect the state of industry. It properly lays more 

 stress upon chemistry, with its many applications, than upon biol- 

 ogy, which has far fewer ; more upon electricity than upon molec- 

 ular physics ; and more upon organic than inorganic chemistry. 

 The university, which is entirely distinct from and higher than any 

 form of technical or professional instruction can be, should represent 

 the state of science per se. It should be strong in those fields 

 where science is highly developed, and should pay less attention to 

 other departments of knowledge which have not reached the scien- 

 tific stage. It should be financially and morally able to disregard 

 practical application as well as numbers of students. It should be 

 a laboratory of the highest possible human development in those 

 lines where educational values are the criterion of what is taught 

 or not taught, and the increase of knowledge and its diffusion 

 among the few fit should be its ideal. As another puts it, " The 

 more and better books, apparatus, collections, and teachers, and 

 the fewer but more promising students, the better the work." In 

 Europe, besides its duty to science, the university must not fail of 

 its practical duty to furnish to the state good teachers, preachers, 

 doctors, advocates, engineers, and technologists of various kinds. 

 Here a university can, if it chooses, do still better, and devote itself 

 exclusively to the pure sciences. These once understood, their ap- 

 plications are relatively easy and quickly learned. The university 

 must thus stand above, subordinate, and fructify the practical 

 spirit, or the latter will languish for want of science to apply. 



The important facts that are both certain and exact, and the 

 completely verified laws, or well ordered, welded cohesion of 

 thought that approach such mental continuity as makes firm, com- 

 pactly woven intellectual or cerebral tissue, are so precious in our 

 distracted and unsettled age, that it is no marvel that impartial 

 laymen in all walks of life are comhig to regard modern science in 

 its pure high form as not only the greatest achievement of the race 

 thus far, but also as carrying in it the greatest though not yet well- 

 developed culture power of the world, not only for knowledge but 

 also for feeling and conduct. It is of this power that universities 

 are the peculiar organs ; to them is now committed the highest in- 



