Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/844

Europeans or essays in which the imaginative faculty was given free play, it being far easier to indulge in speculations than to discover new facts.

In the early struggles of a country to secure a place among nations few men of ability can devote their energies to the pursuit of science for science's sake. The environment is more favorable to development of the inventive faculty than of the peculiar talent for conducting abstruse researches in an exact science. Add to this the limited facilities for acquiring chemical knowledge in the New World and the distance of amateurs from the European head centers of learning, and it is certainly noteworthy that American chemists combined to form associations for mutual improvement and the advancement of their calling at so early a period.

A fourth attempt to establish a chemical society was made at New York city in 1876. The organization was at first somewhat restricted in its plan, but in 1892 a change in its constitution was effected which broadened its scope, and it now forms a strong, influential, and truly national society. Its nine hundred and eighty-four members, working in nine chartered sections, represent forty-seven States and Territories, besides several countries of Europe, South America, and distant Australia. Its Journal, comprising eleven hundred and fifty pages annually, is an authoritative medium for the preservation and diffusion of the researches made in the United States, and its annual meetings, held in diverse localities, strengthen the bonds which unite its members in good-fellowship and in the pursuit of their common profession.

 

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The recent publication of Mr. H. W. Seager's book, Natural History in Shakespeare's Time, has incidentally made it evident that our master poet was great in this as in all other fields, and that his allusions to animal life and habits are not based on the fables in which his contemporaries indulged even when writing seriously on the things of Nature, but on his own or other accurate observations. Of such are his allusions to the quick breathing of the captured sparrow, to the fast work underground of the mole, to the wounded duck hiding among the sedges, to the scattering of the wild geese at the firing of the fowler's gun, and his lamentation over the killing of a fly by Marcus. An English reviewer of the book well says that "the truth is that Shakespeare's natural history is modern in its vividness, its good sense, its sympathy. It is more profitable to compare his bird lore with Gilbert White's than with anything in Bartholomew; more just to set his animals against Buffon's than the grotesque 'four-footed beasts' of Topsell; more useful to verify his botany by Sowerby than by Gerarde or John Parkinson. Modern naturalists and Nature-lovers have not been slow to claim Shakespeare as their brother." Yet his characters sometimes bring in the natural-history fables of the time. They would not be true to what he intended to make them appear if they knew better.