Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 64.djvu/541

Rh meetings are held, where reports are made on all new discoveries and publications.

The finished products of each department, both the coloring matters and the pharmaceutical and photographic products, are tested as to their efficiency in laboratories especially equipped for the purpose. The controlling laboratory for coloring matters is provided with all the machinery and apparatus used in first-class print works and dye houses. Here the coloring matters are practically applied, and it is ascertained whether they come up to the requirements or not, and only when their standard has been determined are they permitted to leave the factory, A very important part of the work of these control or testing laboratories consists in examining the many new products which are the results of the investigations of the scientific laboratories, as to their usefulness, and to find new methods of application for the older products.

As the colors are tested in the dye laboratory, so the pharmaceutical products are investigated in the pharmacological laboratory, at the head of which we have at our Elberfeld works a prominent representative of this science, who was a teacher of pharmacology and physiology at the University of Göttingen. His assistants comprise four physicians and two bacteriologists who are constantly carrying out animal experiments on frogs, rabbits, cats, dogs, etc.

It will be seen therefore that scientific and systematic research has in Germany taken the place of empirical experiments. Although every chemist is a specialist in his own branch, he is enabled to find his way in any other special line of chemistry on account of his thorough general education and the constant accessions to his knowledge.

We should never have reached and would surely not have been able to maintain the high standing which the German chemical industry holds in the world now-a-days, unless this scientific bent of mind, which seems to be a particular quality of the German national character, had governed our work.

As I did seven years ago, so I have this time taken a four weeks' trip through this beautiful country, and have seen many of the American industries. Owing to the extraordinary hospitality and courtesy of the inhabitants of all the cities visited, we have been allowed to inspect almost all the great branches of American industry. Aside from the various and magnificent textile works of the south and the east, we have seen the largest steel works and iron foundries, refineries of petroleum, glass factories, factories for all kinds of electrical appliances and machinery; and of the chemical factories we have visited some of those engaged in the production of heavy chemicals, factories of the organic chemical industry and especially those of the electrochemical industry.