to make them in the highest degree instructive. Why should the United States not join in this generous rivalry, and make an International Exposition the chief feature of its Centennial Celebration? A project of this kind has been ably devised and thoroughly matured; it is to be hoped that a people so full of great things will not break down in its execution under such memorable circumstances, and especially after the enterprise has gone so far as to implicate the national honor.
A CHEMICAL CENTENNIAL.
And, as centennials are now in order, we are happy to see that there is beginning to be a stir in behalf of a Scientific Centennial Celebration for the present year. Dr. H. Carrington Bolton, of the School of Mines in Columbia College, has written a letter to the American Chemist, stating that the year 1774 was so memorable for the number and importance of its chemical discoveries, that it may with good reason be regarded as the birth-year of the science. It was in that year, he states, that the Swedish chemist Scheele first isolated chlorine and threw important light upon baryta and manganese. Lavoisier's experiments upon tin, which led to subsequent discoveries of immense importance, were made also in that year. Dr. Bolton says: "Wiegleb proved alkalies to be true, natural constituents of plants. Cadet described an improved method of preparing sulphuric ether. Bergman showed the presence of carbonic acid in lead white. On the 27th of September in this year Comus reduced the 'calces' of the six metals, by means of the electric spark, before an astonished and delighted audience of savants. On the 1st of August, 1774, Priestley discovered oxygen, the immediate results of which were the overthrow of the time-honored phlogistic theory and the foundation of chemistry on its present basis. It surely requires no lengthy argument to prove that the year 1774 may well be considered as the starting-point of modern chemistry."
In commemoration of these discoveries, Dr. Bolton suggests that "some public recognition of this fact should be made this coming summer. Would it not be an agreeable event if American chemists should meet on the 1st day of August, 1874, at some pleasant watering-place, to discuss chemical questions, especially the wonderfully rapid progress of chemical science in the past hundred years?"
We think this suggestion excellent, and hope it will be carried out. Fortunately the date is favorable, as it occurs in the season of general vacation. We suggested some time ago that such a centennial as this ought to be celebrated; and, as the great discoverer of oxygen was exiled to this country by foreign intolerance, and died here, we proposed to erect a statue to him in the Central Park. But monuments to scientific men are not yet much in favor. They erected one to Dr. Jenner, the discoverer of vaccination, in Trafalgar Square, London; but the place was wanted for a military hero, and so the Jenner statue was carted away to an obscure place in Kensington, and planted down by the public water-filters. He, whose discovery had saved more lives annually than the collective armies of Europe could destroy, if all put at their business, had to give place to one who had signalized himself in a small way, in the work of destroying his kind. Let the chemists meet and celebrate the birth and growth of their science; perhaps in another hundred years the turn of the discoverers will come.
"RESPONSIBILITY IN MENTAL DISEASE."
Whatever may be said about the futility of "theories" and the importance of "facts," it is certain that we
