SOME ECONOMICAL PROCESSES CONNECTED WITH THE CLOTHWORKING INDUSTRY.

[Footnote: Read before the Society of Arts, London, May, 1884.]

By Dr. WILLIAM RAMSAY, Professor of Chemistry at University College,
Bristol.


In this present age of scientific and technical activity, there is
one branch which has, I think, been the subject of an article in the
_Quarterly Journal of Science_. It is one which deserves attention. It
was there termed "The Investigation of Residual Phenomena," and I can
conceive no better title to express the idea. The investigator who
first explores an unknown region is content if he can in some measure
delineate its grand features--its rivers, its mountain chains, its
plains; if he be a geologist, he attempts no more than broadly to
observe its most important rock formations; if a botanist, its more
striking forms of vegetation. So with the scientific investigator. The
chemist or physicist who discovers a new law seldom succeeds in doing
more than testing its general accuracy by experiments; it is reserved
for his successors to note the divergence between his broad and sweeping
generalization and particular instances which do not quite accord with
it. So it was with Boyle's law that the volume of a gas varies in
inverse ratio to the pressure to which it is exposed; so it is with the
Darwinian theory, inasmuch as deterioration and degeneration play a part
which was, perhaps, at first overlooked; and similar instances may be
found in almost all pure sciences.