as may be necessary. This guidance should be wholly informal. Formal lectures and other modes of conducting instruction in large classes have no place in the Graduate Division. Units and credits should be reminiscences of the past. The student's work has become his life work. He has already entered upon his vocation as surely as the engineer who graduates and begins the survey of a railway or the building of bridges. Informality of relations between professor and student and an atmosphere of congenial comradeship in a common work are necessary to the success of this, perhaps, the most important development of the University. It follows that graduate classes must be small. The education of the Graduate Division cannot be conducted with droves of students.

The prosecution of investigative work in particular lines should be supplemented by seminars which have a double function; first to afford an opportunity for the presentation and discussion of the students' own work for the purpose of eliciting criticism and suggestions; and second, to supply an arena for the discussion of the results of others as set forth in the literature of the subject; so that the students may be brought into complete acquaintance with the state of advancement of the science. The only test of the proper conduct of a department in the Graduate Division is the publication of the results of its students' work and the reception of the latter by the fraternity of scientific men competent to judge it. These results may be largely bricks out of which a noble scientific edifice is in process of construction by coöperative effort throughout the world. So long as they are sound, properly made bricks they will be well received. Occasionally the results may take the form of a design for a new wing of the edifice, or may even necessitate a remodelling of the whole structure. Then we may know that we have given to the world a great man.

In this graduate work both the professor and the student must enjoy perfect freedom. The only restraint permissible and consistent with success is the criticism of the soundness of results; and this can come only from scientific men, not from administrators, or regents, or pulpits, or laymen, or newspapers, or even committees for the promotion of research.

WORK OF THE DEPARTMENT OF CHEMISTRY IN WAR TIME

EDMOND O'NEILL

Modern war could not be conducted without the chemist. Everything pertaining to warfare is the result of some chemical process. Whatever the soldier eats or wears, or fights with, or defends himself with requires the services of a chemist to manufacture it at some time or another. This is true of course in peace as well as in war. But war is the strenuous time of life. Everything is speeded up, and no one feels this pressure more than the chemist. War time is the period of inventions, and all inventions are applications of chemistry. The inventions may be mainly mechanical, but the materials of which the device is made, the principle on which the new idea is based, is a principle of chemistry or physics.

But it is not for new ideas alone that we call upon the scientist. In the routine of war his services are indispensable. His influence is frequently more far reaching than may be appreciated at first sight. Take any of the modern high explosives, trinitrotoluol, the triton, or T. N. T., as it is more familiarly called. This chemical is made from toluol and nitric acid. The toluol is obtained from coal tar, or gas, or petroleum by a somewhat complicated process. The nitric acid is made from nitre, or from ammonia, or from the air by even more complicated methods. Sulphuric

acid is also necessary for the manufacture of the nitric acid, and the making of this body is also an involved chemical process. Many other chemicals are necessary in the manufacture of trinitrotoluol for its purification and for its testing.

The T. N. T. would be useless for its purpose until it is enclosed in a shell. This shell is made of a metal that must be smelted from its ore, another chemical process. It must be exploded by a fuse or detonator, requiring more complicated chemical processes to prepare these igniters. And then these projectiles must be thrown miles to where they can do the most good, or harm. The chemist has pointed out that the properties of iron can be greatly modified by alloying with various metals. The cast-iron cannon of the Civil War have been supplanted by steel, alloyed with various metals that alter its properties in such a degree as to make it almost a new substance. The production of iron and the conversion into the various kinds of steels and alloys used in the gun and in the tools essential to its fashioning are most refined and difficult examples of the metallurgist's art. To fire this high explosive many metals must be used-iron, copper, tin, lead, silver, mercury, aluminum, zinc, nickel, manganese, chromium, tungsten, vanadium, antimony, bismuth, and sometimes others. The chemist must search the whole earth for the ores of these metals; he must devise methods for reducing, smelting, purifying, and alloying.

We now have the shell and the gun. Powder is necessary to project the shell. The modern smokeless powders are mostly guncottons. Here again we have an example of the ingenuity of the chemist. From the soft inert cotton, with his nitric and sulphuric acid and various other chemicals, he produces the violently explosive guncotton. More chemicals are needed to make this guncotton into smokeless powders; alcohol, ether, acetone must be manufactured, and more treatments and processes, before the finished and comparatively safe product is ready for use. Guncotton

is but one of the many explosives used in modern warfare. Numerous others are employed, all requiring great chemical skill to produce and to refine them. All manner of bodies, organic and inorganic, are used in their preparation. Special chemical knowledge and specially trained chemists are required for the manufacture of each one of them.

One more chemical is needed before the shell can be sent flying on its mission of destruction. The cap or detonator, made of fulminate of silver or mercury, must be inserted. This most unstable material, prepared with extreme precautions and under conditions of great danger, is the agent that starts the cycle of chemical decomposition of the bodies that have been built up with so much labor and the expenditure of so much time. In a few seconds the trinitrotoluol has reached its destination, exploded, and dealt the death and destruction that the chemist has planned.

This is a brief account of but one of the problems that the war chemist must solve. When we think of the myriads of other problems confronting him, the multitudinous details accompanying the manufacture of each of the necessary chemicals, the search for the raw materials, the method of manufacture, the purification, the testings, the application, one stands appalled at the magnitude of the chemists' task. Added to this is the fact that many of the problems were new to the American chemist when the war broke out. We depended on Europe for many of these chemicals. Raw materials had to be sought out, factories had to be erected, processes devised, experience to be gained, and all this under high pressure and with few skilled men. It was a task that seemed unsurmountable.

Nor were the problems only military. Modern civilized life is built up on chemistry. The much discussed aniline color industry was one of the smallest and least difficult. It would be beyond the limits of this paper to go into details, but there is no field so vast, with so many unsolved problems, so many new discoveries to be made, so much