A Chemical “Wrecker”

Abstract

THE work of a teacher of chemistry is becoming more difficult and more perplexing every day. The mass of facts of primary importance both to the science and to technology is now so great that the amount of time that can reasonably be devoted to the business of lecturing during an ordinary College course is wholly inadequate to overtake them. The chemical student of to-day is naturally expected to have a wider range of knowledge, and a far higher standard of acquirement, than his brother of five-and-twenty years ago. The wonder is, that one small head can carry all that he is required to know. One inevitable result of this mass of material is seen in the specialization, both in work and in teaching, which is becoming increasingly apparent. There are chemists to whom the chemistry of the carbon compounds is rapidly becoming a sort of “Dark Continent,” and who begin to regard the intricacies of a structural formula with much the same feelings as they would look upon the tangled vegetation of a jungle; and, on the other hand, there are men to whom the sesquipedalian names of organic chemistry are as familiar as household words, but who are oblivious to the most ordinary facts of mineral or physical chemistry. Specialism is of course inevitable. The field is far too big to be ranged over by one man if he means to do his fair share of the work of cultivating it. But the question remains, What to teach, and how to teach it? The truth is, that as chemistry is too frequently taught to-day, the facts obscure the view of the principles. We pile up the deck-load when we ought to jettison half the cargo. What we want is, a stricter subordination of facts to principles. We need to import the methods of the statistician into our procedure. Could anything be more deadly dull, or intellectually more depressing, than the courses of so-called “advanced chemistry” professed in some of our Colleges, in which the only stimulus to mental exertion on the part of the teacher and the taught comes from the spur of the inevitable examination at the end? Not one teacher in ten seems to recognize that his first duty is to be interesting. His first duty, he will tell you, is to pass his men; and as our systems of examination are at present ordered, the passing is more a question of the facts than of the principles. And yet no one who has listened to the lectures of such men as Liebig or Hofmann or Victor Meyer can doubt for a moment that the teaching of even the most “advanced” chemistry is capable of affording a high intellectual enjoyment. But then, such men are not the slaves of a Syllabus; they are not held in bondage in Burlington Gardens. They are free to develop their own methods and to stamp their own individuality on their work. The revolt in the Nineteenth Century, the other day, might have been more successful if it had been more judiciously fought. The chemist who knows, can afford to smile at Mr. Frederic Harrison's sneer at the value of the knowledge of the number of the isomeric amyl alcohols. Of course, the bare fact of the number is not of cardinal importance, but it is evi dently not givan to Mr. Harrison to know all that is implied by that fact. In this respect at least, Mr. Harrison is a degenerate disciple. The Master's knowledge of chemistry was not bounded by the limits of a volume in the “International Scientific Series”: Comte had dabbled sufficiently deep in the science to have appreciated the real worth even of the fact, could he have lived to acquire it. But, although Mr. Harrison may shoot badly, the circumstance that he should have gone to the barricades at all is significant; and every teacher who has a soul above that of a crammer must share in his growing impatience with the present condition of things.

Chemical Lecture Notes.

By Peter T. Austen, Professor of General and Applied Chemistry, Rutgers College, and the New Jersey State Scientific School. (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1888.)