Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/540

524 common alcohol "methyl-carbinol," and they ignore the euphony in such words as pentamethyldiamidothiodiphenylamindiiodomethylate (a substance begotten and baptized by Dr. Albert Maasen).

Those whose chemical education consisted in attendance on a course of lectures illustrated by experiments performed in their presence, interspersed with occasional recitations from a prosaic text-book which taxed the memory in true Chinese fashion, may be pardoned for retaining very hazy impressions of the true character of the science. On the other hand, many thinking and reading persons recognize the magnitude of the scope and operations of chemistry, and have some appreciation of its benefits to mankind.

The fields of chemistry explored by zealous investigators are prodigious in extent and diversity; in its various sections, analytical, agricultural, pharmaceutical, physiological, and technological, it yields fruit of infinite value to the human race, and, co-operating with other sciences, produces results which promote civilization in the highest degree. So rapidly are new methods of cultivation applied to these fields, so numerous and active are the workmen engaged in tilling them, that the harvest is too abundant for mental storage, and those who survey the operations at a distance are quite unable to apprehend the products. This inability to follow the advances made by chemical science is felt not alone by those whose imperfect and non-technical training has illy fitted them for the task; even the specialist stands aghast at the prospect, and, abandoning attempts to apprehend the progress made in all departments, confines his reading and research to a limited number.

The twelve principal chemical societies of the world have an aggregate membership of nearly nine thousand; almost all of these members are actively contributing to the advancement of chemical science, publishing their results for the most part in periodicals especially devoted to the subject. Excluding transactions of societies and journals