Omaha daily bee., 1918-05-11

It is as adapters of the discoveries OF
others that German scientists, too, have
made their way. There has been among
them no Calico, no Francis Bacon, no Isaac
Newton. Germany has prided herself on her
contributions to chemistry, but the French
Lavoissier is by all regarded as the founder
of modern or quantitative chemistry; Dalton,
the Englishman, established the atomic
covered the periodic law which classi-
fes the elements according to their weight
And the new" chemistry dates from 1885,
when the Frenehman Becquerel of the fourth
generation Of a family of great chemists
showed that compound OF uranium evolves
some ssort of radiation which impresses a
Photographic plate and thus paved the way
for the epoch-making discoveries in radio
activity OF Madame Curie.
In the great work that has been done to
develop the evolutionary theory no German
can claim to have been a pioneer, and he
would be bold, indeed, who accorded pre-
eminence to Haeckel and Weissmann, as
against Lamarck and Darwin and Alfred Rus
Dutch Hugo De Vries, on whose investiga-
ton the wonders wrought by Luther Bur-
bank are so largely based.
With all the attention paid by German
scientific men to the minutae of investigation
we might have expected that theirs would
be the credit for the modern germ theory,
but this great contribution to civilization
was left to the genius of Pasteur to make
He is best known among laymen for his
discovery of cure for rabies; but, notable
as this is, it was the least of the long series
of gifts with which he enriched the world
He revolutonized chemical biology; he
created chemical pathology; and he estab-
lished the germ theory of infection. His
great pupil and successor was Metchinkoff
Russian. Is it not retributive justice that
while Pasteur's bitterest opponents were
German, ultimately one of the foremost of
German pathologsts, Koch, was enabled to
make his discoveries only by adopting
Pasteurs theories and following out his OBJ
servationsl
Of the many discoveries and inventions
that have made the 10Th and 10th centuries
perhaps the most memorable of all time,
hardly one is of German origin. Germans
did not invent the steam engine, nor, with
their notorious facility for adapting the dis
coveries of others, did they apply it to rail.
way or to ship transportation. England
and the United States had the genius to
present these contributions to civilization.
The typewriter is not German, nor the tele-
graph. These and the transatlantic cable
we owe to an American. AS is we'll known.
that instrument of convenience, the tele-
phone, owes its origin to Alexander Graham
Bell, Canadian. Without the epoch-mak-
ing experiments of Langley, supplemented
by the genius of the Wright brothers, the
world might have had to wait many years
for the perfection of the airplane, which has
been put to such significant use in the pres
ent war, though the practice of utilizing it
for the purpose of numbering women and
children had its origin in the German brain.
The utilization of gas for lluininatng pur-
poses is an English discovery, and we are in
debted to our own Brush and Edison for
the electric light, as we also owe to the
latter the phonograph. We need hardly be
reminded that the submarine is American
and that Marconi gave US the wireless. The
Germans perfected only that greatest fail
ure of this war, the Zeppelin.
Let US not deprive the Germans however,
OF a. credit that IS justly theirs. They first
employed poisonous gas to make the horrors
OF war more horrible, and, with Characters
tic stupidity, they employed it on the west
ern front, where the prevailing winds are so
constantly against them that the allies now
smother them at will in a reproduction of
their own villainy. Also a German, Otto,
invented the gas engine, and Daimler, the
internal-combustion engine, using a product
of petroleum as fuel, although it was Pam
hard, Frenchman, who first saw its posi-
bilities as applied to motor vehicles. :,