THE PLACE OF RESEARCH IN EDUCATION. 749 



Now, Perkin, when a student with Hofmann, had worked with anthra- 

 cene, and seeing the practical importance of the discovery, again set 

 to work and anticipated Graebe and Liebermann in the discovery of 

 a process of manufacturing alizarin. He at once began to make it 

 artificially. His works prospered, and during several years the produc- 

 tion of artificial alizarin was an English industry. But Perkin made 

 the unfortunate "English" mistake of working almost single-handed. 

 The Germans, meanwhile, were silently but steadily working in their 

 characteristic manner, studying every detail, and soon came to the 

 fore and became masters of the situation. 



Perkin's business is now continued as the British Alizarin Company. 

 The conditions under which this firm is working are somewhat peculiar, 

 and such as to procure for it considerable advantages, but the success 

 which has attended its labors is sufficient to show that such an indus- 

 try might be carried on with special advantage in this country if organ- 

 ized in the proper spirit. Several years ago I had the opportunity of 

 visiting the works shortly after I had inspected the most fully equipped 

 factory of the kind in Germany, and I was agreeably surprised to find 

 that the English works were distinctly in advance of their continental 

 competitors, being able to deal economically with larger quantities. 

 But whereas here the anthracene-color industry is much as it was, 

 abroad it has expanded in various important directions which are prov- 

 ing highly remunerative, whilst the original madder dyes, although 

 produced in larger quantity than ever, are made at slight profit, owing 

 to the excessive competition that has arisen. 



Now artificially made dyes have all but displaced natural coloring 

 matters, indigo excepted, even among so conservative a people as our 

 Indian subjects, and the industry is of enormous importance, although 

 not to us. We are so much behindhand in the race that there is little 

 chance of our regaining a good place in the list of runners, even if we 

 go fully into training with that object. 



And not only dyestuffs are made from coal tar. A whole list of 

 substances of the greatest value in medicine are also now prepared 

 from raw materials derived from tar; some of these have proved to be 

 most efficient substitutes for quinine, and the growth of cinchona bark 

 in India and Ceylon has consequently ceased to be the remunerative 

 pursuit it was. All such substances have been the outcome of 

 researches carried out in the German universities, or in the still more 

 highly equipped laboratories of the German chemical works. More- 

 over, of late years nature's perfumes have one after the other been 

 forced to disclose their character to the pertinacious inquirer, and have 

 been claimed as victims by the chemical manufacturer abroad, although 

 here again the example was first set by Perkin, who in 1868 showed 

 how coumarin, the odoriferous principle of the Tonka bean, might be 

 artificially prepared. 



If we seek to understand our early success as well as our later failure 



