CORRESPONDENCE REFERENCE NEEDS OF THE CHEMIST IN INDUSTRY T o the Editor DEARSIR: The editorial in your November, 1935, issue, couceming the quality of chemical graduates, was very interesting to me, because of my interests for a number of years in editing and compiling of data for the Hodgman-Lange Handbook of Chemistry and Physics and more recently my own Handbook of Chemistry. Perhaps I am somewhat biased in my point of view, but to use your own words, "we probably stress the side of the picture that we know best." So few of the teachers of chemistry appreciate the difficulty which many of their students encounter after they leave the university. Their employers are often men with a business or legal training who have no conception of the difficultiesof a technical man with limited library facilities. This difficulty is noticed especially by the recent graduate who locates with a small organization, which is often located in a small city. The employer does not provide much of a library and does not realize that a technical man cannot possibly remember all the data he may have occasion to use. The chemist for a small company is often the only technical man in the organization and frequently is called upon for advice in fields other than his own specialty. Is it any wonder that many such employers criticize technical training when their employee displays ignorance? But in many cases this ignorance is not because of a poor university training but because there is available to the employee only a limited amount of data furnished by his former textbooks-books which were designed to teach principles and not to substitute for encyclopedias.
Many teachers of chemistry show little concern for this difficulty, which so many of their students encounter after graduation; this, I suppose, is due to the fact that most teachers have always had available a good college or university library. I hope the time will come when more of our teachers will see to it that their chemistry students enter their professional careers possessed of at least a few books of general reference. N. A. LANGE SANDUSKY,OHIO N. Y. S. S. T. A. RESOLUTION T o the Editor DEARSIR: At the recent meeting of the New York State Science Teachers Association at Syracuse, N. Y.. the following resolution (No. 5) was adopted: Resolved: That it is the sense of this association that we would be glad to support one National Organization of Science Teachers, and that we regret that there is an apparent duplication of effort in this direction. That one important function of such a National Organization should he the development of a single National Publication devoted to the teaching problems in the science sequence from grades one to twelve, utilizing the foundation already laid by the science teaching journals now in existence. That copies of this resolution be sent to the department of science instruction of the National Education Association, to the American Science Teachers' Association, to School Science and Mathematics, to Science Education, and to the JOURNAL OF CHEMICAL EDUCATION. Sec.-Treas. LOUISJ. MITCHELL,
