Chemical Digest - ACS Publications - American Chemical Society

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Chemical Digest

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ABSTRACTS Freezing Flames to Check Their Spread. ANON. Compressed A i r Mac., 32, 2177 (Oct., 1927).-This article describes a fire extinguisher which puts out fire by lowering the temperature of the fuel to a point below its kindling point, through use of liquid carbon dioxide. E. R. W. A Standardized Mental Test vs. an Unstandardized English Test as a Means of Predicting Success in College English. T. M. CARTER. Sch. and Soc., 26, 151-2 (July 30, 1927).-The mental test which has been given to incoming students at Albion College for several years was made, this last year, a part of the Freshman week activities. The results of this test, along with all other available records, were used in r rouping the students and, in addition, a brief preliminary test in English was prepared by the head of the English department. The coefficient of correlation resulting from the ratings of the psychological and English tests are given; also the means of determining the correlation between college grades and the two tests mentioned above are stated. K. S. H. An Objective Study of Student Honesty during Examinations. N. FENTON. Sch. and Soc., 26, 341-4 (Sept. 10, 1927).-Three of the most reliable students in an institution where the honor system did not exist, chose as a thesis topic the problem of "Student Honesty during Examinations." These three students were so seated among the other students a t various examinations that each had a definite number to watch over. Any evidences of dishonesty were recorded, and it was found t h a t about 03 per cent of the students actually cheated. The manner in which these examinations were conducted and the conditions, etc., under which they were held are given. The writer states that until training in honesty is provided in the primary grades, K. S. H. we cannot expect i t to exist among students in the higher schools. Freedom and Education. 0 . DECKOLY. Sch. and Soc., 26, 353-5 (Sept. 17, 1927).-The writer explains the meaning of the ward freedom with reference t o the child, stating that the opinion commonly held is that of mere laxity The advantages and disadvantages experienced by children of the middle class and those of the aristocracy, of city and of country life, are discussed. From an educational standpoint, that child who is least restricted appears t o be K. S. H. the better fitted for his environment. The Junior and Senior Colleges in a College of Liberal Arts. J. B. JOHNSTON. Sch. and Soc., 26, 302-7 (Sept. 3, 1927).-The Univ, of Minnesota was one of the first of the state universities to make a distinction between the junior and senior colleges, hence the statements made in this article ate in response to letters of inquiry regarding such a distinction a t this University-objectives, curriculum, student problems, etc., being considered. The junior college is concerned with: the presentation of a well-prepared and organized body of secondary studies; professional courses; and with constituting a testing mound to determine the fitness of students for the ~rofessionsand for more advanced kdy. The senior colle~eis concerned with: general education resultiup in indemndent lhinkml: a : d an a h i l t y tc, do r e m r c h , a d a n or I h i Fur how .tvd(ntr who I A V V n t def.nttc ~ t n t , ntiun.;. s p m a l curricclum >i o!lercd Th: r t k t h d of in4ructam in rhc nr c ~ d l w c \nrce+ar~l\.\ s r ~ c slnccacw of n differencein the t v ~ and e numb& of students, and & nature of ;he subiect-matter. Recitations, dis&&ions, and quizzes constitute the greater part of the program in the junior

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?he services 01 acommittee o n general educational and vocational guidancc are available to any freshman during Freshman Week activities. The method of registration, which differs considerably from the ordinary, the provisions made foradvising the students, and the type of students with whom the counsellors deal are discussed. K. S. H.

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FEBRUARY. 1928

College Libraries and Chemical Education. P. L. K. Gnoss AND E. M. GROSS. (Oct. 28, 1927).-The relative usefulness based on past as well as present content of the various chemical periodicals is shown by tabulating all references to foreign journals in Vol. 48 (1926) of the J. Am. Chem. Soc. For the American College which is preparing students in chemistry to do graduate work a t other institutions the following list of periodicals (current and files) are recommended: (1) Publications of the A. C. S., (2) Ber., complete, (3) J Chem. Soc. (London) from 1891, (4) Z. phys. Chem. from 1895, (5) Liebig's Ann., files important, and static reprints are available, (6) J. Phys. Chem. from 1910 or 1920. Other highly desirable journals G. H. W. are listed in order. What Price the Ph.D.? ANON. Harvard Alumfii Bull., 30, 33 (Oct. 6, 1927)."It is estimated that a Ph.D. from Harvard is worth in the neighborhood of $30,000.'' Thus speaks a Boston newspaper after a survey of the teaching careers of Harvard graduates with and without the higher degrees. And further along in the same account stands the statement that "in private secondary schools . . .graduates have been able to capitalize on athletic ability to the extent of about $500 a year in addition to the average salary." A notable victory for scholarship! A Ph.D. can earn $1000 a year for thirty years in addition to what he might have earned without his doctorate; an athlete only half as much and that only as long as he is young enough to coach. The reckoning may he a bit rough, hut we are comforted. The Press has recognized the money value of learning. The article in question is not, as a matter of fact, a "recognition" of anything. It is a very simple statement of certain interesting trends in the salaries paid to Harvard men in teaching. Graduates without higher degrees find i t impossible t o secure positions as teachers in colleges. The raw A.B. m y teach in the schools, particularly in private schools and more certainly if he has a record in athletics wherewith to supplement his record in studies. He may start a t $1400 a year. The M.A. may start in school or college a t $1800; the Ph.D. has a good chance to get a college post a t 52500. "Few teachers with only an M.A. degree are able to earn more than $3200 a year;" whereas those who have the Ph.D. are likely to go as far as 56000 after which "the professor must depend almost exclusively on his writing for any additional monetary reward." Colleges with lower standardsplace a higher artificial value on the Ph.D.; and the professional schools, which pay more than the colleges, think less highly of degrees of any kind. The artide doses with a significant paragraph: "Although teaching has for many years been looked upon as an under-priced profession, . . men can earn mare in the first few years in teaching than in business. This has attracted hundreds into teaching far a few years while they earn enough to study in aprofessional school. If they abandon their professional plans they find i t embarrassing to leave teaching for business a t a lower income, and this dilemma supplies the great bulk of the teaching profession of this country." This statement is intended, obviously, to apply to teachers in the schools, not in thecolleges; for the Ph.D. who enters college teaching has already had a prolonged training and is not teaching temporarily in the hope of entering another profession later on. It brands the teachers who are not Ph.Ds. as "left-overs.'' Nothing in all this is new, except perhaps the attempt to estimate the money value of degrees. I t does serve, however, to emphasize the fact that America does not really value education, nor take i t very seriously. We have faith in education, hut our faith finds its expression in externals-in buildings, textbooks, organization. We expect miracles of requirements and courses of study. We do not take education seriously because we do not yet understand that the heart of the educative process is the teacher and that we must have for teaching from the beginning to the end the best talent that money can buy. I t is an old story, hut we have not heard i t often enough to act on it. When teaching pays very Little a t the beginning and far more in every grade a t the end; when teachers in schools are equal in training and value to teachers in colleges: and when preparation for any teaching whatever is far more prolonged and severe than i t is a t present, our "faith" in education will be matched by "works." S. W. H. American Chemical Society. EDITORIAL. Tech. Reu.. 30, 11 (Nov., 1927).James Harvey Robinson once wrote a hook, "The Humanization of Knowledge," which surely the leading spirits in the American Chemical Society have read or heard of, to judge from the discussion topics on the agenda of their meeting programs. No American society is so industriously concerned in the humanization of knowledge as is this one; i t must be confessed that a t times they seemingly overshoot the mark and fumish material for such criticsas Arthur Lynch ("Science Leading and Misleading") and C. E. Ayres ("Science: The False Messiah"). Science, 66, 38E-9

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ABSTRACTS

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At its meeting held in September a t Detroit, many subjects of a non-technical nature were discussed: the present age was termed the Age of Chemistry, perhaps t o compete with similar terms, such as the Age of Electricity, the Machine Age, and so on; it was declared that "Science has killed the navies of the world;" an appeal was made for a return to the idealism of Ralph Waldo Emerson; the abandonment of the classics was deplored and chemistry declared too materialistic. Certainly all of this is indicative of a lively culture among chemists. This fact has frequently been observed, though no one has ever suggested why chemistry, more than any other xience, with the possible exception of physics, stimulates its practitioners t o broad and humanistic ways of thought. At the Detroit meeting the organization of a division of the history of chemistry was announced, for which Tenney I,. Davis was appointed Secretary. Researches into the history of science are t o he conducted by the division "to bring about greater emphasis on the humanities in scientific education." Professor Davis himself, possesses a unique collection of early hooks on science and related subjects. S. W. H. The Key to What? EDITORIAL. Iiarvard Alulnni Bull., 30, 123 (Oct. 27, 1927)."Have members of the Phi Beta Kappa during the century and a half since it was established, contributed mare than their due proportion to the ranks of the leaders in all branches of American life?" This is a question which John Clair Minot of the Bosfon Herald undertakes t o answer in the current issue of the North American Review. The total membership of the Phi Beta Kappa, he points out, has never exceeded three one-hundredths of one per cent in thenational population. I n 1900, twenty-nine Americans were chosen to have their names emblazoned in the Hall of Fame. The selection was made with great m e and deliberation from among the long list of outstanding figures in American literature, science, statesmanship, and all the other conspicuous fields of human activity. Thirteen of the twenty-nine were members of the Phi Beta Kappa. One adult American out of 2000, on the average, gets his name in "Who's Who," but among the living wearers of the Phi Beta Kappa key the ratio is one to five. Eleven of the twenty-nine Presidents of the United States, five of ten Chief Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States, and eighteen of forty Secretaries of State have been members of Phi Beta Kappa. S. W. H. The Goal of Education. EorronrAL. IIarvard Alumni Bull., 30, 209-10 (Nov. 17, 1927).-Arthur Stanley Pease, '02, was inaugurated President of Amherst College a fortnight ago. His inaugural address contained many significant passages, but the one that seems to he attracting the largest amount of attention is his reference to the obligation of the liberal college in the matter of training men t o use their leisure hours aright. Teaching young men how t o make an ennobling and effective use of their leisure in after life he declared to he one of the main functions of a college, and not simply an incidental one. I t was a good point on which to set emphasis. During the past half dozen years , much stressing of hizher education in its ourelv vocational there has been, ~ e r h a mtoo aspects, and todmuch discussion of its d u e as passport t o quick skcess in business or in the professions. Every little while some statistician, with a firm faith in the law of averages, figures out the value of a college degree just as a real estate dealer would calculate the front-foot value of acomer lot. Incidentallv. the former alwavs demonstrates that the earnings an money invested in tuition fees =re so big that if lhey came within the provisions of the Transportation Act they would be subject t o recapture. That kind of thing may be well enough in its way, but i t tends t o stamp upon the public imagination a n idea that the college undergraduate is merely making a sort of prevocational investment, the justification of which lies wholly in the speed with which he can command a good livelihood after he graduates. And, as an inevitable corollary, comes the demand t h a t college instruction be frankly adjusted to what these young men are planning t o do when they get out into the world. This demand, indeed, has reached a point where the colleges are being vociferously urged t o obtain "job specifications" from the industries, banks, and other big employersaf fledgeling graduates in order that undergraduate instruction may be revamped along the "practical" lines which such specifications may suggest. This notion that a college is nothing more than a place where men are trained to get jobs, and hold jobs, has spread far. I t is well that President Pease should have pointed out that a college is not fulfilling half its true purpose if i t does this and nothing more. The college should assume that most of its graduates will succeed, make money,

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and have leisure a t their disposal. Experience warrants this assumption. But what will its graduates do with spare time when it comes to them in the due course of human events? Everybody knows that there are thousands of reputedly successful men to whom leisure is a burden because they have never discovered any satisfying way of using it. I t is one of the prime functions of a liheral college to keep its graduates from drifting into that category. This i t should do by encouraging in its students breadth of intellectual interest, versatility, and a spirit of public service. Such qualities can never he developed by warping the college curriculum, or the methods of education, into unison with any set of job specifications wheresoever obtained. S. W. H. Too Many Colleges and Students? EDTTOXAL.Harvard Alumni Bull., 30, 2 (Sept. 29, 1927).-The seasonal migration of American youth t o several hundred "centers of learning" serves t o shift attention from trans-oceanic aviation, the Davis Cup, and heavy-weight prize-fighting t o the lateral pass and the problems of higher education. We are again reminded, this time by President Angell in Harper's for October, that our colleges are said to bc "over-populated." The writer reopens the debate by pointing out that the question is really a qualitative rather than a quantitative one. If our colleges were thronged with eager scholars, hungering for truth, and intent upon the rewards of the intellectual life, we should not he dismayed There would he a momentary embarrassment, perhaps, like that of a merchant who has more customers than he can accommodate, but he would cheerfully enlarge his plant and increase his stock. The real problem lies not so much in the fact that there are too many students, but rather in the fact that too many of them are not students. There are too many men and women in college who are inadequately endowed, inadequately prepared. and inadequately motivated to obtain from college what the college is designed to give. I t is as though the merchant were to find his premises occupied by people who had neither the money nor the desire t o buy his wares, and who obstructed his real customers. Thus toview thematter from the qualitativerather than from the quantitative an& otters the bcrt im,,pectoi;l wise .wlutiun. buy givrrr collcgc may limit imtr~hcr\a c w r I it,& LO 815 rewurecs ur rnctl~otlsof i n ~ t r u ~ t i ohut n , if t l m ~C~X. C I U ~go) C ~t~ 0t1.e~wilt ;P\. or 3re lcft lmt ~ l t o ~ e ~ hthe e r zencrd . issue is onlv w3derl And who can mcrt tlu\ .

Radium at theMemorial Hospital. CIOCCHINA FAII.I.A. Srd. Mo., 25,56+74 (1)ec.. 1927. .-: descnptior~ I of the rndhud of handling a mass of 4 p. of radium when used fur thrrapeutlc purposes is dtscrihcd. Thc radium i5 h t v l l y Drotecterl with lend. the

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orgnniratwn has been kcerd; frlt 11; thousands of nhle e&nturj the world over is evident from the elforts of many to cwate uryanizntions, the ultimrtte aim of which would bc their drvelnpmcnt woncr or later intosnmes~~chorp:inizatiun as theabove. I t wcndd seem arl\,isahle that surh :iBureau of Education be an outgrowth of the Lcaguc or Sations if it is to he eflioent and uf u n i v e ~ a service-thc l League of Nations 1,elnc more or less firmlv ectablwhed. svm~arheticallvand intellieentlv backed. and ~in activeoperation A htieauuf this type, w~khrrpreir.r;tativesfron>hr ;ariukcounuies. could accumulate a vast amount of knowledge othrmisc unohtamahlc. A living organism--nourished with the bcst food of its kind, it would tend toward a forward and

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upward m o w m m t of civilir~tion. There would and 1 rohs1,l xlwnys will rrrnun m.ijor cl~t?crcncesin the educational systrmr. ul the v.anI chcatmx durinu mammatimi. C u n x rpcntly. ~ndpmgan honor system. we must rrmemlm that the ~ t u d ~ who n t cheats ~~~

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requirements. On the contrary, such cour~e;may be made very valuihle to students. .\course in the philowphg