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Chemical Digest
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EDITORIAL PARAGRAPHS
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attention has been directed to an editorial on "Evaluating Ideas"' from which we quote the following paragraph:
Chemists are frequently called upon to evaluate ideas of their own and those of other people. I n research, this is a matter constantly present. In industrial research, the element of market and profit must be considered from the beginning. In the wider field of manufacturing, the soundness of ideas enters largely into profit and loss. Occasionally, a single idea floats a company to great prosperity; and failures of what were "safe" organizations may be traced to the pursuit of unsound ideas.
Again, from the same source comes this paragraph: Those who have followed an original idea thmugh its process of reasoning, through its embryonic laboratory or manufacturing states, thmugh its plant production and marketing stage, perhaps through patent difficulties, and have met up with all the various kinds of resistances, real and imaginaty that can, and do, surround everything new or newly undertaken, have gained something that will always be foreign to the individual who has a knowledge only of the operation of a more or less established system. There is, perhaps, a larger place for chemists in their consulting capacities as business econamists, if they will but apply their training in being critical of their own work to the many problems of manufacturing and business. They have a host of viewpaints to bring, that do not come so readily to many business men; they should possess a rather valuable set of iuterrelated facts tucked away in their experience; they should have a facility for thinking in terms of several industrial gmup- a t one time; they should know the literature well enough to seek out submerged danger points; they should have an international viewpoint that is often valuable; and they should be able to acquire the general common rules of the game.
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OLLO Walter Brown in his book, "The Creative Spirit," says, "In Amenca, where we boast of being especially concerned with progress, creative mindedness is usually neglected, it is often positively stifled, and it is not infrequently treated as a symptom of grave disorder." A review of this book in Chemical and Metalluvgual Engineering elicited the following editorial comment:2 Education, we agree, too often lacks the "quickening" teacher. Many a university organization suffersfrom inadequate co6rdination;and the teacher fails to elicit a helpful spirit of sympathy in his problems and aspirations. Bigness, we read, is not always a signof health; it often leads to fatty degeneration. If we should become gravely and earnestly concerned with the making of smaller, less cumbersome units in educationvlits in which the individual need be neither Con. Chem. M Met., 9,257 (1925).
' "Scope for Initiative and Inventiveness," C h m . b Met. Eng., 32, 907 (1925).
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coefced nor lost-we could find means of doing so.. . I t is even proposed that the system of individual colleges in vogue a t the two leading English universities might he employed as a point of departure. In other words, a redistribution is favored, which would not involve a duplication of work.
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DEAS Should Have Concrete Expression;" says another editorial.' We call your attention to the following paragraphs:
But even in these days of a better understanding of just what education m m s , there is often a failure to ap~reciate the truth that it is the outward nhvsical .. . ew~ressian ~of a mental state that makes it real. Glib parrotings still pass in many schools as the end of school work. Teachers often lose sight of the psychological truth that without expression in some outward form the mental state is pale and shadowy. What gws on in the mind is really never there in the psychological sense until it has been exmessed in some outward form. Externalizing an idea in some way, putting it 05 from us, is the only way to gain real possession of ourselves. Long continued study with no opportunity for the expression of knowledge in life's activities is too likely to make dreamers rather than doers. Rehearsing the opinion of others, memorizing facts ascertained by others, going over and over the weary round of second-hand information, as is not infrequently done in high-school classes, is it any wonder that the high-school student seems at times, to lack forcefulness and initiative?
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HE work of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, established by the English government in 1915, is made the subject of comment in N a t ~ r e . We ~ quote the following: At the first meeting of the British Association, held 1831, the Rev. W. Vernon Harcourt proposed that the Association should "employ a short period of every year in pointing out the lines of direction in which the mearches of science should mom; in indicating the particulars which most immediately demand attention; in statingproblems to be solved and data to he fixed; in assigning to every class of mind a deiinite task; and suggesting to its members that here is a shore of which the soundings should he more accurately taken, and there a line of coast dong which a voyage of discovery should he made." This early suggestion adumbrating the organization of scientific research met, apparently, with no response, and academic research continued to he conducted entirely on individualistic lines until a few years ago, when a government department undertook the organization of certain investigations which were realized to he of fundamental and national importance.. . . . .The seeds of State-aided organimtion of science were sown well back in the 19th century, but credit for having transformed "an amorphous mob of scientific workers" into something resembling "an organized army" belongs to the department of Scientific and Industrial Research. The department has been very successful in directing the choice of directors of research upon whom much depends and in allowing them free hand. Of the more distant future, one can speak with less a m a n c e and with less optimism. For vears past there has been marked tendencv for industrial firms to amdamate. or ~to pool their resources and interests in other ways, the latest development in this d i m tion heing the unification of all lame German chemical comnanies into a hnze - cornoration w i t i a capital of about ~32.00o.000. To what extentsuch aggregations are de-
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Am. Educ.. 29, 105 (1925).
' "CoBperative Research."
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h'atu~e,116, 853-5 (1925).
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sirable from the points of view of the home consumer and the nation is a matter of opinion, but there is no doubt that large corporations can, and do, dispense with extraneous aid in carrying out all the research work they require, whether it be fundamental or incidental. There will be less diversity of opinion concerning the truth of the Prime Minister's statement (quoted in the report of the department) that our trade will never be able to cope with unexpected emergencies, a t home or abroad, until scientific method and scientific men occupy a better position in industrial affairs. Why the position of the scientific man is inferior to that of the financier and administrator, to what extent he himself is responsible, and how far it is due to the inherent and uncorrected perversity of others, are questions outside our present scope, but they all seem to center around the larger problem of how to bring home to the people a sense of the actual and potential value of sciehce in the maintainance and perfection of human life. Much of that value h ; just as Malebranche declared that if he held truth captive in his lies in r e ~ e a ~ cand hand, he would let it escape so that he might pursue and capture it again, so we may say that if we held world supremacy in science and industry, we would let it go, so that we might be forced to use research in the struggle to regain it. ~
THE ROYAL ROAD "I have heard a good many definitions of education, but I know of none better than this-the development of one's capacity to understand."' Each one ofns will, no doubt, concede to Mr. Munro that definitions of education are not lacking. However, we may not agree quite so readily that the one to which he refers satisfactorily conveys our idea of the true meaning of the word. "He that would bring home the wealth of the Indies must carry the wealth of the Indies with him" is very applicable in this case and so each individual finds a different meaning in "education." What is your idea of education? Quoting further from the same author: "Education is not merely a matter of assimilating various chunks from the world's stock of accumulated knowledge, although there are a great many people, both old and young, who look upon it in that light. In much larger measure, education is the process of training men and women to realize the range and the profundity of their own ignorance." Our attention is again called, in the same article, to the tendency of people in general to seek a "royal road to learning." Nor is that tendency restricted to learning alone but persists in showing itself in the process of reaching any end which we set out to attain. We must get where we are going in not only the shortest time possible but also with the least possible effort. Mr. Munro says: "The quest for a royal road is being given up, and what people are now 1 ''Scientific Education and Unscient&c Democracy." Wm. Bennett Munro. Haword Grud. Mag.., 34, 175-85 (1925).
