Am.  Jour.  Pharm.) 
November,  1902.  ( 
The  Writing  of  a  Thesis. 
529 
thing  new.  While  I  grant  that  it  is  no  easy  matter  for  a  professor  to 
suggest  some  line  of  work  or  subject  that  will  yield  something  new 
to  each  of  a  class  of  ioo  students,  still,  I  believe  it  could  be  done,  and 
I  sincerely  hope  that  it  will  soon  be  done.  We  all  know  that  in  the 
good  old  days  of  Liebig  and  Scheele,  chemistry  and  pharmacy 
were  about  equally  advanced ;  in  fact,  pharmacy  had  most  probably 
the  lead,  for  the  only  way  Liebig  could  get  some  chemistry  at  first 
was  in  a  pharmacy.  But  gradually  the  teachers  of  chemistry  got 
their  students  to  get  out  new  facts  and  ideas  in  their  theses,  and 
gradually  the  interest  in  the  work  and  the  number  of  the  theses 
grew  until  they  ran  into  the  thousands.  From  these  thousands 
of  facts  of  past  theses  the  great  science  of  chemistry  has  been 
evolved.  While  all  this  was  going  on  in  chemical  colleges  and 
schools,  poor  pharmacy  was  running  along  in  the  same  grooves  as  of 
yore ;  and  her  sons,  while  they  were  also  writing  theses,  did  not  have 
such  energetic  and  hard-working  teachers,  and  did  not  evolve  but 
few  new  facts.  Their  theses  were  collaborations,  mere  well-written 
collections  of  what  others  had  done,  said  or  thought,  and  only  here 
and  there  a  few  contained  original  investigation,  original  thought 
and  new  facts.  We  are  reaping  to-day  the  fruits  that  our  pharma- 
ceutical forefathers  sowed,  and  we  write  to-day  principally  literary 
effusions,  rhetorical  efforts,  containing  beautifully  worded  and  more 
or  less  beautifully  written  accounts  of  what  the  great  men  of 
pharmacy  have  done,  usually  spread  out  over  as  many  pages 
as  possible.  One  single  new  fact,  one  single  new  method,  one 
single  new  compound,  one  single  new  idea,  using  only  a  single 
line,  is  worth  more  ten  times,  yea,  a  hundred  times  more,  than 
all  the  calligraphy,  rhetoric  and  diction  you  can  crowd  into 
a  folio-volume.  Think  of  the  tremendous  advances  that  phar- 
macy would  have  made  during  these  hundred  years  if  she  had 
had  a  Liebig  to  set  her  the  example  of  how  new  facts  should  be 
worked  out,  and,  above  all,  that  no  one  was  worthy  of  a  diploma 
until  he  had  learned  how  to  evolve  new  facts,  learned  how  to 
investigate  the  unknown.  We  all  know  how  very  far  Germany 
is  ahead  of  all  the  rest  of  the  world  in  chemistry  to-day,  but 
perhaps  all  do  not  know  that  she  occupies  that  exalted  and 
enviable  position  solely  because  her  students,  her  candidates  for 
degrees,  were  taught  how  to  evolve  new  facts,  how  to  delve 
into  the  unknown  and  lead  the  bright  light  of  day  into  those 
