Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 64.djvu/296

292 will be reached as a necessary consequence, for the intercourse stimulates thought, and thought leads to work, and work leads to wider usefulness.

While in 1848, when the association was organized and the constitution was adopted, there was a fair number of good scientific investigators in this country, it is certain that in the half century that has passed since then the number of investigators has increased very largely, and naturally the amount of scientific work done at present is very much greater than it was at that time. So great has been the increase in scientific activity during recent years that we are apt to think that by comparison scientific research is a new acquisition. In fact there appears to be an impression abroad that in the world at large scientific research is a relatively new thing, for which we of this generation and our immediate predecessors are largely responsible. Only a superficial knowledge of the history of science is necessary, however, to show that the sciences have been developed slowly, and that their beginnings are to be looked for in the very earliest times. Everything seems to point to the conclusion that men have always been engaged in efforts to learn more and more in regard to the world in which they find themselves. Sometimes they have been guided by one motive and sometimes by another, but the one great underlying motive has been the desire to get a clearer and clearer understanding of the universe. But besides this there has been the desire to find means of increasing the comfort and happiness of the human race.

A reference to the history of chemistry will serve to show how these motives have operated side by side. One of the first great incentives for working with chemical things was the thought that it was possible to convert base metals like lead and copper into the so-called noble metals, silver and gold. Probably no idea has ever operated as strongly as this upon the minds of men to lead them to undertake chemical experiments. It held control of intellectual men for centuries and it' was not until about a hundred years ago that it lost its hold. It is very doubtful if the purely scientific question whether one form of matter can be transformed into another would have had the power to control the activities of investigators for so long a time; and it is idle to speculate upon this subject. It should, however, be borne in mind that many of those who were engaged in this work were actuated by a desire to put money in their purses—a desire that is by no means to be condemned without reserve, and I mention it not for the purpose of condemning it, but to show that a motive that we sometimes think of as peculiarly modern is among the oldest known to man.

While the alchemists were at work upon their problems, another class of chemists were engaged upon problems of an entirely different nature. The fact that substances obtained from various natural