professional services of a kind and extent that can not be rendered by the parson, or the doctor, or the lawyer; or yet by the amateur engineer, or the amateur electrician, or the amateur chemist. It is the competent services of professional men, specially trained in their several departments, that are alone adequate, and are alone accordingly in request. To the trained professional chemist, as to other professional men, interests of occasionally enormous value are committed; and some notion of the consideration in which his work is held may be gathered from the extensive resort had everywhere to his services, even by the great departments of state and by the most renowned and important of municipal and other corporations.
Among Government Departments, the War Office, the Home Office, the Board of Trade, the Local Government Board, and the Board of Inland Revenue, have each their respective permanently attached staffs of professional chemists, with whom from time to time, in relation to special subjects of inquiry, other chemists of distinction are associated. Among corporations and public institutions of all sorts, the City of London, the Metropolitan Board of Works, most of the great provincial Corporations and Local Boards, the Royal Mint, the Houses of Parliament, the Elder Brethren of the Trinity House, the Thames Conservancy, the Royal Agricultural Society, the great Gas and Water Companies, the different Metropolitan Vestries and Local Boards, and many more such bodies, have recourse alike to the regular services of their permanently attached professional chemists, and to the supplementary services of various others among us whom they find it necessary to call into consultation from time to time. And of yet greater extent as a whole is the habitual resort that is had to the services of the professional chemists by mercantile and manufacturing firms and associations, engaged in almost every variety of commerce, manufacture, and industrial enterprise. Alike, then, by the great departments of state, and by commercial firms of worldwide renown, and by traders and producers occupying a less distinguished position, the multifarious services of the chemist are ever in request. And in respect to ourselves, by whom those services are rendered, from those of us occupying the leading positions in the profession, to the most humble individuals practicing in our ranks, we are all associated in a common work, and have all a common credit to maintain, and are all under mutual obligation to co-operate with and advance the interests of one another.
It would seem, however, from observations not unfrequently hazarded by some very superior persons, whose happy mission it is to put the rest of the world to rights, that there is something derogatory to the man of science in making his science subservient in any way to the requirements of his fellows, and thereby contributory to his own means for the support of himself and of those depending upon him. Now, on this not uncommon cant of the day, a little plain speaking would
