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Chemical Research in Its Bearings on National Welfare
Chemical Research in Its Bearings on National Welfare Author:Research Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: MODERN ACHIEVEMENTS Professor Fischer, in the opening remarks of his lecture to the Kaiser-Wilhelm Society, pointed out that in many branches of science, and ... more »in physics and chemistry in particular, many of the fundamental laws'upon which these sciences were built up have, in the fierce light of modern research, proved untenable or insufficient: " At the present time," he says," more than at any other period, we are inclined critically to examine the fundamental principles of all branches of knowledge, and, when necessary, to introduce far-reaching alterations in our original conclusions. This state of mind applies particularly to the natural sciences. During the last decades our actual knowledge has been extended to an extraordinary degree owing to new methods of research, and in view of the most recent observations the older theories have proved in many cases to be far too narrow. Even the fundamental principles of our knowledge appear, to a certain extent, to demand revision. " Thus the progress in physical science forces us to adopt views which are incompatible with the older principles of mechanics, in spite of the fact that these were regarded as unassailable by thinkerssuch as Hermann von Helmholtz, Heinrich Hertz, and Lord Kelvin. "The same state of affairs obtains to even a greater degree in the biological sciences. In comparative anatomy, animal and vegetable physiology, theory of evolution, microbiology, and almost all branches of medical science, the rapid advance of experimental knowledge is accompanied by an equally rapid change in established theories. Even the semi-historical sciences, such as geology, palaeontology, anthropology, and the venerable science of astronomy, are taking active part in the general progress." It must not be imagined, ho...« less