416 THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY 



and as a rule in the 'morn and liquid dew of youth' — the poignant grief 

 of parents and friends, worn by the strain of anxious days and still 

 more anxious nights — these make us feel a death from typhoid fever 

 to be indeed a Delian sacrifice. For fifty years the profession has 

 uttered its solemn protest as I do this day; we have done more — we 

 have shown how the sacrifice may be avoided and the victims saved." 

 The marked decline in the incidence of typhoid fever in late years, due 

 to the combined efforts of medical men, sanitary engineers, and public 

 health officials, must have given Osier untold satisfaction. 



But if William Osier was a public personage whose life played a 

 part, great or tiny, in that of every one of us who has known what it is 

 to be sick, what shall we say of the incomparable Emil Fischer, per- 

 haps the greatest organic chemist who ever lived, whose place in the 

 history of his science will be secure when Osier's in the development of 

 his, is centuries forgotten? How many have heard of Emil Fisher? In 

 his own group, chemists and biologists, he has for a generation sat on 

 the highest tier of the seats of the mighty, and yet his place has been 

 quite without the public ken. A supreme investigator who undertook 

 the most fundamental and most difficult problems of his science, he 

 carried on a labor which by its very nature has been inexplicable to 

 the average man. To be sure the average man would not wish it ex- 

 plained to him, would resent it deeply if forced to listen to such dry 

 stuff. But he is safe. No newspaper in the country would be competent 

 to discuss it for him. The pathetic attempts of the daily press to keep 

 up on the relatively simple subject of poison gas in the late war and the 

 rude caricatures of chemical nomenclature which finally found their 

 way to the proof reader and past him, merely serve to emphasize this 

 point. 



Let us see if, without being too technical, we can show how it was 

 that Emil Fischer came to stand so high above the crowd. Forty-five 

 years ago Fischer discovered phenyl hydrazine, an accomplishment 

 which alone would have sufficed to give him some fame, but in the 

 hands of its discoverer phenyl hydrazine became a tremendous weapon, 

 a 42 centimeter gun, a whole park of them in fact, for a war on the 

 ultimate nature of the carbohydrates. These last substances are of im- 

 measurable importance, making up as they do the bulk of matter in 

 the vegetable world, including the sugars, starches, wood and various 

 intermediary bodies. With the different sugars, scores in number, into 

 which all of these substances can be ultimately resolved, phenyl 

 hydrazine yields characteristic crystalline precipitates, permitting 

 relatively easy identification. Be it said, once and for all, however, that 

 Fischer did not pack up his phenyl hydrazine and his polariscope and 

 enter the sugar business, nor did his altruism lead him to desert 

 theoretical fields and apply his trained mind to the production of cheap 



