Moreover, the domain of the science of the transformation of matter
includes even life itself as its loftiest phase: from our birth to our
return to dust the laws of chemistry are the controlling laws of life,
health, disease and death, and the ever clearer recognition of this
relation is the strongest force that is raising medicine from the
uncertain realm of an art to the safer sphere of an exact science. To
many scientific minds it has even become evident that those most
wonderful facts of life, heredity and character, must find their final
explanation in the chemical composition of the components of life
producing, germinal protoplasm: mere form and shape are no longer
supreme but are relegated to their proper place as the housing only of
the living matter which functions chemically.

It must be quite obvious now why thoughtful men are insisting that the
public should be awakened to a broad realization of the significance of
the science of chemistry for its national life.

It is a difficult science in its details, because it has found that it
can best interpret the visible phenomena of the material world on the
basis of the conception of invisible minute material atoms and
molecules, each a world in itself, whose properties may be nevertheless
accurately deduced by a rigorous logic controlling the highest type of
scientific imagination. But a layman is interested in the wonders of
great bridges and of monumental buildings without feeling the need of
inquiring into the painfully minute and extended calculations of the
engineer and architect of the strains and stresses to which every pin
and every bar of the great bridge and every bit of stone, every foot of
arch in a monumental edifice, will be exposed. So the public may
understand and appreciate with the keenest interest the results of
chemical effort without the need of instruction in the intricacies of