REPORT
nificant fraction of potential users. Apart from the monetary rewards through royalties, there is a great personal satisfaction in learning that the author's efforts have been found useful to others in the profession. A good job in authoring a text may be as important a contribution to the profession as publication of several research papers. I have been asked, also, to comment on the question of whether laboratory directions should be given in textbooks, or in separate manuals. At many institutions, laboratory manuals or directions for local use have been developed, and they have the great advantage of not requiring minor, unimportant changes in details—e.g., concentration of certain reagents, size of samples, etc.—when there is a change of textbook associated with the course. Inclusion of laboratory directions, either in the text or in an accompanying manual, is a great service to many teachers in small colleges, where teaching loads may be heavy and one teacher may be instructing in several areas; he simply does not usually have the time (nor in some cases, the background) to work up and test the experimental part of the course, and must therefore rely on the efforts of someone else in this regard. As a
rule, publishers consider separate laboratory manuals a "necessary evil" for general chemistry, but they take a dim view of separate laboratory manuals for most other chemistry courses. By this time the reader may have the notion that the writer is opposed to change, to experimentation with curricula, to modernization, to progress. Nothing of the sort ! But I do believe that "wet chemistry" 'will be with us for a long time. Anyone with a moderate, or even a small amount of training can perform the operations of "running" an analysis (determination or measurement) , even on complicated instruments. One must not forget, however, that the "black box" which delivers the recorder chart when the appropriate dials are set and buttons are pushed, still requires a suitable sample, the preparation of which often requires much more expenditure of effort and application of chemical principles than the act of measuring some property of the sample. Let us use caution in crowding out the important traditional or classical material of analytical chemistry (indeed, of other branches of chemistry also), lest the pendulum swing too far before (hopefully) starting its return toward the equilibrium position.
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David F. Boltz is professor of chemistry, Head of the Analytical Division, and ViceChairman of Department of Chemistry at Wayne State University in Detroit. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1938, took an M.S. at the University of Missouri at Rolla in 1940 and a Ph.D. in analytical chemistry at Purdue in 1946. His affiliations include Sigma Xi, Phi Kappa Phi, Phi Lambda Upsilon, Alpha Chi Sigma, and the American Chemical Society. Dr. Boltz is a consultant in analytical chemistry for Atomic Power Development Associates. Comments
by D A V I D F. B O L T Z
Considerable concern has been expressed recently about the academic status of analytical chemistry. Professor Reilley has delineated some of the perplexing problems relevant to the academic training of competent analytical chem-
ists. It may seem somewhat of a paradox that at a time when well trained analytical chemists, especially at the Ph.D. level, are so much in demand and commanding premium salaries that this discipline is in the process of either being eliminated or being shunted to an
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VOL. 38, NO. 2, FEBRUARY 1966
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