ar? Leaving the arts aside, it is quite certain that in any
region where careful observation and painstaking thought are required,
no one can afford to neglect Germany. Recently I was looking through
May's 'Guide to the Roman Pottery in the York Museum.' Among the names
of those dealing with the subject of Roman pottery I suppose the best
known are those of Dechelette and Dragendorff--the one French, the other
German. Among the other references I found fourteen to German
publications and four to English, one of the latter being merely a
museum catalogue. No one can study philosophy without continual
reference to German thought. Even in a subject so English as the study
of Shakespeare the work of Gervinus is fundamental, and from the time of
Lessing to that of Ten Brink there has been a succession of German
commentators. Those of us who have worked at all at science know only
too well what we owe to Germany there. It has, indeed, been at times
painful to compare the mass of the German output with the comparatively
thin stream of English work. Of course, there has been splendid English
research, but as a people we are not lovers of knowledge, and we are
specially loath to apply it. Again and again our scientific papers have
been filled with diatribes against our English neglect of science, and
the diatribes were needed. I remember asking a British firm of repute to
construct for me a resistance 'bridge' of a simple kind. I explained the
whole purpose of the apparatus, but when it came back to me the
resistance wire was soldered down in two places to broad bands of brass.
This, of course, altered the resistance and rendered the apparatus
useless. A rudimentary knowledge of electricity would have made such a
mistake impossible. Contrast this with the following: When I was a
student a lecturer wished to prepare a rather rare compound for some
work of his. We both tried for long to prepare a specimen, but failed,
probably because the temperature of our furnace was not high enough. We
then sent to a German firm of manufacturing chemists, and they prepared
it for us at once. I remarked recently to an English scientific chemist,
'No English firm would have done that.' 'Well, if you had pressed them,'
he replied, 'they would have sent over to ---- (a German firm) and then
put their own label on the bottle.' A 'chemist' in too many of our works
has too often been a lad who has picked up some routine knowledge, but
who has no more sc