The Portland daily press. [volume] (Portland, Me.) 1862-1921, 1872-01-09
THE PRESS
TUESDAY MORNING, JAN. 0, 1879.
A Conflict Of Chemists.

JfrOm Tue N. L. WoIlu.
There are certain arts and sciences to which
the old name of mysteries" may still be
rightly applied. That is to say the knowledge
.oi them is confined to the small class of the
practitioners of them and hidden from the
mass OF men whom their results affect. In all
such callings there are sure to be quacks, ,and in
many such callings the difference between
competency and quackery is difference of
life and DEATH
Nothing we might almost say is better
known than the properties of steam, and no
science ought to be more accurately an exact
science than engineering applied to steam.
Yet the experts called in the Westfield case
had every expert his own explanation of the
explosion, and agreed in nothing save that
each insisted upon the ignorance of all the
rest.
And now in the case of Mrs. Wharton we
have the same conflict of evidence among
men rated as experts i'll chemistry that we
had in the case of the Westfield among men
rated as experts in engineering. These men
are all professors" of the science they under
take to expound, and the net result of their
expOsitions in so simple problem as they had
in this case is chaos of contradictions.
professor Aiken and professor Toney
and Professor" McCulloch and professor
Reeves handy charges of gross ignorance
And yet these men are all eminent and almost
equally eminent as experts. 1t was the repu-
tation of their eminence that procured them
to be called at all in the case. And the most
interesting result of the case to the public is the
conclusion reached by comparing their evil
dence that at least halfof them, ,eminentas they
may be, know nothing of their business. This
is not a cheering conclusion for the public.
For the public, which intrusts the life of a
woman to be settled by evidence, half of
which is utterly worthless, has no means of
knowing which half to accept, or whether to
accept any. The figure man makes in his
vocation must be its only test of his compe-
tency in it; and that test is shown in this vo-
cation to be no test at all.
There is perhaps no immediate redress for
what is thus an evident grievance. As chem
istry and engineering grow to be real sciences
the charlatan in either of them will be proven
to be charlatan and disabled from disgrac-
ing either of them. But it is well to take
notice that it is proven that neither of them
is so now, and we must go on intrusting our
lives whenever we sicken or whenever we are
accused of such crime as that for which
Mrs. Wharton is arraigned to those whose
best work is little more than guesswork and
empiricism. By way of consolation we may
know, however, that analytic chemistry is
capable of becoming perfect science. Wheth-
er science will ever be able to prevent a man
from dying except of accident or old age we
need not conjecture. But at least it ought to
tell certainly what is found in him after he is
dead.
This is proper occasion to indicate anoth-
er science-that of law-which the followers
of natural science are apt to sneer at as arbi-
trary and uncertain. The Wharton trial
shows that the law does, and the natural sci
ence with which lawyers have had to deal in
the course of it does not, achieve the results
it aims at. 1t is surely more difficult to find
out what is in a mans mind than what is in
his stomach. The chemists dispute whether
there was tartar emetic in the stomach of
General Ketchum. The lawyers have made
it manifest to all men that there were igno-
rance and darkness in the minds of the chem
lists. We need not quarrel with the arbitrary
maxims and the technical rules of evidence
which have attained this result when those
who carp at them have been unable by indica-
tions from nature and scientific tests to ar
rive at an equally satisfactory solution Of their
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