our schools for research men. From university after university, from college after college, the combined lure of great research opportunities and of much larger financial returns has taken from our academic life far too many of our most promising young men, the very men on whom the country has been depending for the filling of our great university chairs as the older men now holding them gradually will age and retire. Unless prompt measures are taken we shall witness in a few years such a dearth of first-class tried material for professorships that second-rate men will be placed where the national welfare needs the best we have, and third- and fourthrate men will be occupying positions in which we should have young men of the highest promise in the period in which they are reaching full maturity. Indeed, it is greatly to be feared that even now we are witnessing a gradual lowering of standards. It would be futile to appeal to our industries not to call the men they need, although in the not distant future they will suffer most severely from the situation which is developing, if the present tendencies remain unchecked. The only possible source of relief lies, I believe, with the presidents and trustees of our great universities, and to these the second main plea of this privileged discussion is addressed. These authorities should recognize the fact that their institutions have now entered a period of severe competition between the industries and academic life for chemists of the highest type and greatest promise. They have already learned the only method of meeting this kind of competition successfully, for they have faced the same problem in two other professions, medicine and law in the face of the tremendous financial attractions of the practise of either of these professions our most progressive universities have simply put their

law and their medical faculties on a higher, more nearly professional scale of endowment of professorships than obtains for their other faculties. They must, it seems to me, take the same measures with their chemistry staffs: it is primarily a question whether they can be awakened to that need now or whether they will let the country suffer from their lack of foresight and let us learn from the most efficient of our teachers, bitter experience. Wise provision now would not only safeguard our present standing in a critical period of our history, but in this time when the importance of chemistry has been brought home to our young men as never before, the new attitude, properly announced, would attract a large proportion of the men of brains, talent and ambition who enter professional life, but tend to study law or medicine as holding out much greater opportunities for the satisfying of their ambitions.

Adequate compensation is important for a research man-and to his type in university and college I must restrict my remarks it is important both from the point of view of his self-respect and also especially for the sake of comparative freedom. from worry concerning a fair provision for his family. But inadequate compensation is not the only danger seriously threatening the outlook for chemistry in our universities. Let us remember that healthy progress in our science is dependent primarily on university men pursuing great lines of original investigation. It is true that we now have well-endowed national institutions of research, such as the Rockefeller Institute and the Carnegie Institution, but universities can not afford to surrender to these the main burden of insuring progress in the theory of our science, because these are not teaching institutions. To take from our universities the choicest of our research men would deprive our

young men of that inspiration and fertilization of their minds in the period of their greatest acceptiveness which early intimate association with great investigators alone can give. To my mind it is clear that if universities would fulfil their highest mission they must remain the seats of the best type of research. But such research is the product of an extraordinarily sensitive state of mind. Only the greatest powers of concentration of thought make it possible. The investigator is groping for truth in unexplored regions, wary of every pitfall, most fearful indeed of possible illusions of his own highly excited imagination. Let any one imagine himself groping in a dark and unfamiliar room and he will easily realize that the undisturbed concentration of his every faculty is the only way for him to attain his goal! Let the rush of an automobile or the screech of a locomotive detract his attention but for an instant and he may well have to rue a stubbed toe or a grazed shin! Now, figuratively speaking, there are too many noisy automobiles and screeching locomotives in the lives of our distracted investigators. Amer. ican universities, in general, have the unfortunate custom of loading down their best investigators as heads of departments with administrative duties of all varieties, ranging from clerical functions to committee work, important for the institution, but always a grave obstacle in the path of successful research. Younger men, even when they show marked research ability, are too often worn out with excessive duties of instruction and laboratory detail, when their minds need their keenest edge to cut their path to the elusive truth! Men in whom the research instinct is inborn and overpoweringly intense, will break through these difficulties-usually at the cost of the neglect of other duties-but our system is one that means an extraordinary waste of

talent for the highest type of work on duties that minds of lesser fineness could do just as well or better. On top of these older defects, which we have been only slowly recognizing and removing, have come in the last few years the further distracting duties of necessary public service. Let me repeat what I stated earlier in the evening: every one of our great chemists, as well as of our less well known ones, is eager to devote every particle of his knowledge and strength to the sacred duty of the moment. Theoretical work has been set aside except as it contributes directly to the cause of national defense. But let us begin to realize now that when peace comes we must let our investigators return to the service of pure science, we must leave them severely alone, free from committee work of any kind, so that they may recover that opportunity for concentration which is needed for productive research of permanent value! Some of our research men, I dare say, are being spoiled forever for this service, exactly as many a returning soldier will have lost in a craving for adventure his fitness for ordinary civic responsibilities.

There is a strong movement too in our society to bring universities and industries into closer relations, a laudable movement with which I am in heartiest sympathy, but which can bring unmixed benefits only if it is most wisely guided. It would be fatal if it were allowed for the sake of temporary advantage to injure in any way that search for truth for the sake of the truth itself on which, after all, the great structure of our science as of all sciences rests. Let the large proportion of members in our society who are primarily interested in applied chemistry, recall as a typical illustration of a very general truth that chemists had tried for fifty years to manufacture sulphuric acid by the contact process and had utterly failed, and that success finally

came only when the laws of physical chemistry, products of the research of guileless university professors, were available and were applied to the problem! Who can doubt that we still need the efforts of new Faradays, van't Hoffs, Roozebooms, Bertholets, Kekules! The question has impressed me as so vital a one for the outlook for chemistry in this country that as president of our society I have put on the committee charged with the development of relations between industries and the universities primarily university research men, with the understanding that they will give to pure research in our universities the benefit of every doubt in their recommendations. I trust that our society, as a whole, will realize that it were better that our industries suffer somewhat temporarily than that our national strength in chemistry be crippled at the source. My personal opinion is that we can attain both of our objectives to use a war phrase. Thus, our present war duties are making university men personally acquainted with numerous practical problems which in many cases after the war, will probably form the basic material for investigations of theoretical relations. Even if they are only in a measure as successful as those of Baeyer, when through the study of the structure and synthesis of indigo he opened up the great theoretical fields of knowledge of tautomerism, of the theory of unsaturated compounds and of cyclic derivatives, they will advance both branches of our science, applied and theoretical chemistry. Efforts along the lines of developing the theory of the connection between molecular structure and physiological or medicinal properties are now taking root in a number of our universities. But, on the whole, I would recommend that technical research problems routine analytical and control work should be altogether barred from our universities -that technical research problems be lim

ited in universities to picked men interested in applied chemistry and holding possibly professorships or other appointments in industrial chemistry. In time, these men will become dependent on their colleagues devoted to pure science for keeping step with the progress in our science. I would urge, too, the perhaps novel recommendation that remuneration for such work be made a departmental and not an individual affair. This wise provision is being enforced in those modern medical schools which demand research work of their staffs, fees for practise reverting to the university hospitals and not to the individual. As applied to chemistry, such a provision would be desirable, in the first place, because it would to a large extent reduce the temptation of financial inducements for the men whose talents fit them for work in pure science and whom the country needs for such work. In the second place, one will find that the university man interested in a technical problem is, after all, less useful in a teaching department than the man devoted to pure research: the pressure from outside will lead him to throw a greater mass of administrative detail, of instruction or of the care of research men, on his colleagues. The result is that the department and not the individual really carries the burden of the problem in applied chemistry-exactly as in the medical schools, which still allow their staffs to practise for their own financial benefit, this is all too often done with the drawbacks of inefficient teaching, the ignoring of administrative responsibilities and the leaving to the care of others the provisions for education in research.

I have dwelt on the details of this great problem which is confronting our society, because I would protect the outlook for the growth and success of theoretical chemistry in our country by every means in my power. We have a splendid record: we

tures chiefly concerned with divers nations of Europe and the East now at war or likely to be involved before long, including especially some of our less known and smaller allies. The general plan of most of these monographs will be a résumé of earliest known data, racial origins, shiftings and blendings, historical development and present status, aiming to further a more thorough acquaintance with these peoples, their characteristics and capabilities and the causes which have made them what they are. The appended schedule may be subject to some changes in detail as the season advances and is now necessarily incomplete as to one or two items, but will give a sufficient idea of what is to be expected. The society meets at 4.30 P.M. in rooms 42-43 of the new building of the National Museum on alternate Tuesdays, beginning October 2d, 1917.

EFFECTS OF THE WAR ON TECHNICAL
EDUCATION

WALTER HUMPHREYS, registrar of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has compiled registration statistics which indicate the effects of the war on technical education. The total registration is between eighty-five and ninety per cent. of what it was last year at the same time. The freshman year shows an increase, the percentage in terms of last year's figure being 104, while the second, third and fourth years classes are respectively 93 per cent., 75 per cent. and 86 per cent., of the number in the school in June.

The graduate students stand at 60 per cent. of last year's figure. There is the most shrinkage in the juniors, the sophomores of last year, to whom two years more of schooling has perhaps seemed a long time. The return of eightysix per cent. of the juniors to be seniors is evidence in favor of the junior summer camp. The purpose of this was to give some military practise and an opportunity to anticipate fourth-year studies, and complete work at an earlier date.

In a consideration of the effect on the courses it may be well to omit those with less than fifty men, since the defection of a few students makes an undue percentage shrinkage. One of them, however, naval architecture, is stimulated by the war, the increase being 16 per cent. The course in naval architecture has always been small in attendance and has been maintained by the institute as a contribution to education.

Of the larger courses civil engineering maintains practically the same figure as in former years, the shrinkage being 1.2 per cent., while electrical engineering opens the year with a loss of only 2 per cent. Chemical engineering has 12 per cent. increase. Engineering administration is practically holding its own, having lost only six and one half per cent. since the last registration. Architecture has declined nearly one third in the number of its students. Perhaps the undue cost of building materials, fifty to one hundred per cent. in many cases, and the consequent gossip that building operations will be at a standstill, has had its influence in deterring young men from taking it up with