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managers are diligently studying these problems. They are men of great experience and ability-and the chairman of their association has voiced their progress by publicly saying:

The whole question of the ultimate return of the railroads to private operation has been considered together with the development of a system of public regulation and control for the future which shall not only protect against abuses, but be affirmatively helpful to the development of adequate transportation facilities for the great afterwar tasks of the country.

While, as a war measure, the temporary possession and operation of our railroads by the government was necessary, the continuance of such a system in peace, or of any measure of government ownership with its political evils, would be a calamity depriving the traveling public of the efficient operation naturally coming from the initiative and enterprise and sense of responsibility attending individual management, and always absent where governmental red tape and autocratic authority rule, regardless of the comfort or needs of the public. Some reasonable, responsible governmental oversight or control of these great interests is without doubt necessary. The war urgency, the more intimate relations that war needs have established between governmental agencies and railroad and industrial managers, must and will lead to the establishment of systems of regulation not destructive but constructive in character, that will operate to the lasting benefit of our country.

The need of conservation and development of our latent water-power resources has been emphasized by the war. For years, since the public study of the conservation of our natural resources was initiated in 1908 by President Roosevelt's call for a conference of governors of our states to consider the matterthe National Conservation Congress, and Conservation and Forestry Associations throughout the country, have studied the problem of how best to conserve, and yet to use the country's natural resources, in water-power, and in our mines and forests. When we were brought by this war to realize our dependence on Chili for our supply of nitrates in the manufacture of ammunition, while Germany had evolved

and developed economical methods of utilizing her water powers and of extracting nitrogen from the air, we were taught another lesson in conservation and of the folly of our dilatory laissez-faire system of dealing with the water problem. Under war pressure greater progress has perhaps been made than would have been possible in many years of deliberate peace methods. Serious differences of opinion have existed in the past as to the proper measure of governmental control that should be exercised in the development and use of the great latent water powers of the west, and enabling legislation has been impeded and halted by visionary and wholly unpractical objections to such reasonable and liberal legislation as would encourage capital to enter into and support such development. As a wise westerner has said of the development of the west in the past: The western country was never settled, and never could have been settled, with thirty cents and an infant class," and conservation of our natural resources was well defined by Dr. C. W. Hayes, when chief geologist of the U. S. Geological Survey, as "utilization with a maximum efficiency and a minimum waste."

It is the use, and the avoidance of the abuse, of our natural resources, that conservation properly teaches, not the locking up of these resources. Now in this urgent, intensive war experience a broader national vision has developed. We have learned and have become accustomed to figure in billions, where we used to fear that millions would be wasteful. The government has taken hold of great questions with a giant hand, and has, by its conversion to the truth that in its conduct of great enterprises great men, experienced in the work contemplated, should be used rather than avoided with suspicion, accomplished great resultsand the lesson has been enforced that when needed to attain results, large expenditures may lead to the greatest economy in methods and certainly to greater success in the attainment of ends. Our great corporations may, in view of the government's housing programs, be encouraged to feel that proper measures to that end are a necessary concomitant to the maintenance of satisfactory labor conditions, and

are an economic necessity in large and small operations.

One great lesson in conservation peculiarly applicable to our nervous, energetic, and always hard-working people, we have not yet adopted, because we are so constituted that as a nation or a race we will not learn it, is that of the better conservation of our vital re

sources.

The National Conservation Congress, in its several yearly sessions, has taken, among others, as subjects for study and discussion: Forestry, The Improvement of Farm Conditions, Water Powers and The Vital Resources and Health of our People. When will we learn the lessons of the last, the vital importance to our people of learning to conserve their strength. No one has better epitomized the American wastefulness of vital energy than dear old Mark Twain, who (writing from Naples in 1867), sent us these words, pregnant with the lesson of the higher conservation of life:

We walked up and down one of the most popular streets for some time enjoying other people's comfort and wishing we could export some of it to our restless, driving, vitality-consuming marts at home. Just in this one matter lies the main charm of life in Europe comfort. In America, we hurry, which is well; but when the day's work is done, we go on thinking of losses and gains, we plan for the morrow, we even carry our business cares to bed with us, and toss and worry over them when we ought to be restoring our racked bodies and brains with sleep. We burn up our energies with these excitements, and either die early or drop into a mean and lean old age, at a time of life they call a man's prime in Europe. When an acre of ground has produced long and well, we let it lie fallow and rest for a season; we take no man clear across the continent in the same coach in which he started; the coach is stabled somewhere on the plains and its heated machinery allowed to cool for a few days; when a razor has seen long service and refuses to hold an edge, the barber lays it aside for a few weeks and the edge comes back of its own accord. We bestow thoughtful care upon inanimate objects but none upon ourselves. What a robust people, what a nation of thinkers we might be, if

we would only lay ourselves on the shelf occasionally and renew our edges.

Surely Mark was right in this.

We owe a duty of watchfulness to the men, devoted to public service, who ably lead great movements for the betterment of conditions among our people-men who are not only captains of industry, but generals in the army of public service, and leaders and exemplars in the pursuit of public duty. They become in leading these great movements, in a measure, the custodians of the public welfare, but "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" Who shall care for these very generals, and see that they conserve the store of intelligence, patriotism and energy, that goes out from them to public welfare, that it may not be prematurely exhausted? Surely we should take measures to have them feel how the nation values them as a public asset, and how they owe it to their country as well as to their homes to heed and to preach to others the wise words of Mark Twain.

We perhaps can not conclude that the great war has really taught us to better conserve our vital resources in our men and women, for they have been prodigal in expenditure of their strength in national service, but may we not hope that following the past one hundred years of uninterrupted peace between the Englishspeaking peoples of the world, the closer bond that the war has promoted between our English brethren and ourselves, while giving them a better and closer estimate of us, may bring to us a better appreciation of the value of conserving life as they conserve it, giving our nation the valued services in their advanced years of men who, under our more intensive life, would have reached their limit of useful

ness.

To our engineering profession is due the early study of the doctrines of conservation, later taken up by our publicists and legislators. Conservation is primarily an engineering question. At the first, the organization meeting of the American Institute of Mining Engineers, held in May, 1871, now nearly half a century ago, which I attended, a committee was appointed "to consider and report on the

waste in coal mining" and as the whole subject of the conservation of all our resources developed and was studied, it has always been the engineers of the country, qualified by training, expert knowledge, and intelligence, who have led and must now lead in the study and broad consideration of our best national policy in conservation. It is the duty of engineers to keep in the forefront of the study and teaching of this matter, and to do their expert share towards shaping the policy of the nation to a course based on reason, economic principles and technical knowledge, rather than on sentimental or political diatribe. A greater danger is threatened to the public interests by the untrained, spasmodic, semi-political, and careless presentation and handling of these matters before the public, by men on whom their importance has suddenly dawned, than by a continuance of erroneous methods of the past. The trouble with most of the plans for railroad and business regulation, and for mineral and water-power conservation, proposed by men untrained and inexperienced in engineering and in business and financial methods and problems, is that their plans are apt to be ideal rather than real, their dicta negative and destructive rather than affirmative, positive and constructive, and their remedies untried and theoretical experiments, rather than of practical and efficient effect.

We should recognize, and this great war's awakening and upturn of all preconceived and preexisting conditions has emphasized, the importance of business-like rather than political management of our national transportation and industrial interests, and of all other national affairs involving expert scientific or business knowledge and training. Our country owes an incalculable debt of gratitude and appreciation to the great interests that have led in and made possible the wonderful transportation and industrial development of our land, and we may find that on a large scale we will be killing the goose that lays the golden egg of national prosperity, if we suffer our railroads and our great industries to be nagged and oppressed to the point of possible insolvency by blind unreasoning prejudice largely born of

ignorance, and largely based on political considerations that should not control. The present agitation of the whole subject has a high educational value for our people, and we may be certain that we can in the end trust the horse-sense, the intelligence that in the long run is characteristic of our people, not to be finally led away by 'isms or wild theories, but to use in the final determination of these questions that independence of judgment and sound common sense so characteristic of and inherent in the American people, and for which our politicians so often make the mistake of not giving the people credit.

What better summary of the existing conditions following the war has or can be given than the following from the St. Louis Star, comprehensive in its scope, yet wonderfully succinct in its statement?

A GREATER HUMANITY RISES FROM WAR

During the process of readjustment we shall profit from the lessons the war has taught. In that, aside from freedom for all the peoples of the world, will lie the greatest achievement of the war. When the balance is struck the profit will outweigh the loss. The human lives sacrificed will yield a better and a greater humanity. The cost in dollars will be absorbed quickly in passing years. The material gains will live and produce.

We, in America, have learned something of our strength. We have learned the possibilities of our united effort. We have learned economy. We have learned concentration. These things will mold themselves into our national character. We shall act with a new inspiration. We shall feel a new confidence. We shall have a new consciousness of the invincibleness of righteous purpose. HENRY STURGIS DRINKER

LEHIGH UNIVERSITY

CHEMISTRY AND MEDICINE: A TRIBUTE TO THE MEMORY OF JOHN HARPER LONG1

DR. LONG's life and work, so ably portrayed by Professor Dains, are an eminent instance of

1 An address given November 22, 1918, before a joint meeting of the Institute of Medicine of Chicago and the Chicago Section of the American Chemical Society.

the value of the work which lies in the great field of effort resulting from the relations of chemistry to medicine. For many years the main subjects of his investigations were enzymic action and problems of nutrition, researches of equal interest and importance to the progress of medicine and to the advancement of chemical knowledge. No less close and vital were these relations in the important spheres of influence which Dr. Long had created about himself outside of his laboratory, as instanced by his service of twenty years on the Illinois State Board of Health and by his connection with the Council of Pharmacy and Chemistry of the American Medical Association from its inception in 1905 to the end of his life. The same breadth of interest, supported by his great ability and fearless honesty, led to his selection as a member of Dr. Remsen's famous referee board, and in the last year of his life also to his election to the presidency of the Institute of Medicine of Chicago, which was founded in large measure to further the cause of medicine through the stimulation of research in all fields contributing to the advancement of medical knowledge.

Dr. Dains has discussed in an admirable fashion the details of Professor Long's valuable contributions to science and to the cause of humanity, and I have felt that I could pay no truer tribute to the high aims and achievements of my life-long colleague and friend than by attempting to outline to-night some of the important features of the relations between chemistry and medicine and thus help to have the cause "carried on " which Dr. Long so nobly served and had so greatly at heart.

From its earliest beginnings chemistry has found in medicine one of its greatest sources of inspiration—indeed, the very name of our science refers to the dawn of chemical knowledge in the temples of Egypt, the "land of Chêmi," where priests prepared simple remedies and studied their chemical nature. This close connection persisted through the centuries and found perhaps its crowning culmination in the persons of two modern giants

of the medical world-the greater one, Louis Pasteur, the chemist who turning to medicine and using his chemical knowledge and its exact criteria in its service, founded the knowledge of disease through microscopic organisms, the very foundation stone of modern medicine, and the second, Paul Ehrlich, who inaugurated the present most promising era of combatting these dread causes of disease by the development of specific remedies, produced artificially in the chemical laboratory in the form of pure chemical compounds. Between these two extremes, the cause of disease and its cure, chemistry has found such an infinite variety of lines of effort contributing to medical knowledge that I must necessarily limit my subject and I shall do so by confining myself in large measure to those phases of it with which I am personally most familiar. How necessary such a limitation must be is no better shown than by the fact that at the present moment medical science seems to be turning to chemistry more and more as an essential factor in every one of its fundamental branches. That chemistry was essential in bio-chemistry and in physiology has long been well understood, but of recent years pathology also has turned to chemistry for the solution of its most important problems; the best preparation for a bacteriologist, I am told, is long and advanced training in chemistry; and even the great science of zoology, so long held in thrall by the obvious fact of form, has now turned to chemistry. How vital these applications of our science are, has been impressed most insistently perhaps on me by the the fact. that some biologists seem at length to have reached the conclusion that those most important of all factors in human life, in the very evolution of our race, the factors included in the collective name of heredity, must owe their wonderful power of transmission of characters and character in final instance to the chemical nature, the specific chemical character, of chemical molecules.

With this glimpse into the vast vistas of present and future developments in the domain of the relations of chemistry to medicine, I must turn from these most alluring questions

and ask what my own chosen field of chemistry, which for the lack of a better name we still call pure chemistry, can contribute to the cause of medicine. Let me say at once that I speak almost on the defensive, I have been asked so often by eminent physicians, by physiologists and biologists of every kind, why chemistry is so intolerably slow and backward in solving what are quite obviously chemical problems-problems striking at the very root of our health and happiness. The answer very simply is this: Pure chemistry aims to be and is an exact science; indefinite mixtures of substances, such as our tissues and secretions represent, interest us, it is true, most deeply, but we can handle them altogether successfully only to the extent that we can isolate from them pure principles for exhaustive, complete investigation, so complete that we do not rest until we have dissected the molecule of the pure compound, have put it together again, and thus have acquired first hand knowledge of the exact function of each of its members. In the same way, systems that contain more variables than we can control rigorously, as rigorously as the mathematicians, the physicists and astronomers control their material, pure chemistry puts aside until such a time when our knowledge has advanced far enough to give us exact knowledge of each component in the system, to make possible a rigorous analysis of the whole system. Every physician knows what medicine would be without dissection, without an exact knowledge of the structure and location of the organs and members of the body-every physician knows too how the functioning of the parts in the whole can be understood only by an accurate study first of the functioning of each organ and each member. Now, the scientific dissection and reconstruction of the molecules of important isolated principles is as a rule an extraordinarily difficult problem. Thus it took Baeyer, perhaps the greatest organic chemist of his generation, some fourteen years to determine what we call the structure of indigo, containing only some thirty atoms. But, his success opened the way with the inevitableness of fate to one of man's triumphs over nature: for

with the knowledge of its structure, the key was gained for the successful synthesis of indigo and its artificial preparation on a large scale, releasing many acres of land for the growth of other important products for human use. It took altogether some thirty-four years to complete the campaign for the successful production of indigo, and at that the campaign was planned and conducted by some of the keenest minds in our science and sustained by the prospects of rich rewards in gold for the successful issue! Similar vital work was carried out with other important dyes, such as alizarin or turkey red, methylene blue, magenta. I am emphasizing these facts, not only to illustrate the method of pure chemistry, but primarily to show what the successful issue of its efforts means. These and other dyes had been used commercially with an empirical knowledge during the many years that great investigators studied them from the point of view of chemistry as an exact science -but with the successful issue of their efforts in the profound analysis of the molecular structure of fundamental dyes, chemistry has gained for man supreme and practically unlimited power over the whole problem of color! It has made it possible for us to make at will a dye of any properties we may desirefast dyes for any fabric, unstable, sensitive dyes for photography, dyes of any conceivable shade, fluorescing, if you please, with any desired hue! This instance of the power gained by chemistry has already proved to be of great value in medicine, by the development of stains to differentiate cells, microorganisms, tissues of every variety.

The lesson of this conquest of the world of color by man would be wholly lost, if you did not carry from here the conviction that the methods which have scored so brilliant a success in one field are absolutely certain to be equally successful in conquering the greater world of bio-chemistry. The methods evidently are painfully slow. It took two generations to complete the conquest of colorwould ten or twelve generations be too long for the supreme conquest of the chemistry of life? The campaign has already long been