great expense by incorporating upon the present programme systems of lectures and of manipulations; the lectures to consist of the exposition of the principal chemical industries, and the laboratory work of industrial preparations and applications; and the students should be exercised in comparing manufactured products and in studying the general methods pursued in industrial research, the processes adopted for increasing returns, and other branches of similar bearing. Such instruction demands special fitness—teachers who are familiar with industries and love them. That is the basis of the reform I propose. In order to teach the applications of science, to make known the methods, processes, and desiderata of industry, one must have studied and practiced them himself. He must himself have been a workman. Whatever may be the value of our masters, however great may be their intelligence, they can not develop knowledge in the minds of their pupils that is foreign to themselves, or make them adopt methods of labor which they have never themselves seen applied.
I have already received protestations from the teaching body against seeing men raised to the dignity of professors or lecturers—men who have not their diplomas as licentiates or doctors in science. But I really do not believe that the possession of these diplomas is indispensable to the purpose toward which I am looking; and I fancy that for the treatment of industrial questions it is sufficient to understand them for one's self.
The teaching of which I have thus sketched the programme might be given at the close of the studies of our young chemists and constitute the crowning of them. The reform I propose consists, then, simply in opening our chemical schools and institutes to lectures and manipulations in applied chemistry, and in confiding this special teaching to professors who have themselves been engaged in industry.—Translated for the Popular Science Monthly from the Revue Scientifique.
