The general public should realize that in the support of great chemical research laboratories of universities and technical schools it will be sustaining important centers from which the science which improves products, abolishes waste, establishes new industries and preserves life, may reach out helpfully into all the activities of our great nation, that are dependent on the transformation of matter.
The public is to be congratulated upon the fact that the writer of the present volume is better qualified than any other man in the country to bring home to his readers some of the great results of modern chemical activity as well as some of the big problems which must continue to engage the attention of our chemists. Dr. Slosson has indeed the unique quality of combining an exact and intimate knowledge of chemistry with the exquisite clarity and pointedness of expression of a born writer.
We have here an exposition by a master mind, an exposition shorn of the terrifying and obscuring technicalities of the lecture room, that will be as absorbing reading as any thrilling romance. For the story of scientific achievement is the greatest epic the world has ever known, and like the great national epics of bygone ages, should quicken the life of the nation by a realization of its powers and a picture of its possibilities.
CREATIVE CHEMISTRY
La Chimie posséde cette faculté créatrice à un degré plus éminent que les autres sciences, parce qu'elle pénètre plus profondément et atteint jusqu'aux éléments naturels des êtres.
—Berthelot.