THE CHEMICAL LABORATORY

My attention has been called to an article in The Dartmouth of June 24th, which touches briefly the overcrowded condition of the Chemical Laboratory.

The article is helpful and evokes our gratitude.

We of the department of Chemistry have been reticent—perhaps too reticent — in exposing our disadvantages. We have chosen to make our struggle with out complaint of our handicap, and have borne in moderate silence the occasional implication that we were responsible for limitations, although to increase the efficiency of the department to the full measure of opportunity has been, and is, our constant study.

But since publicity is the word, we are for it, and for facts and figures and details and reasons.

Never has the department in. Culver Hall been so effective and so serviceable to the students of the College as at the present time. No more is necessary than for the investigator to consult the catalogue for 1871, when the building was first in use, and then to come down to the present time, with way stations in 1882, 1890 and 1900, for instance. Its quality was wholly changed and its adaptability enormously reinforced by the gift of $5,000 from Mr. Adolph Levissohn in 1905, and the skilful manner in which Mr. Hunter worked out the plans of the department. It would be a reasonably good laboratory today for half the numbers who throng it.

And, notwithstanding the tremendous load that always threatens, but has not yet overwhelmed us, there is only one serious limitation of properly qualified men—freshmen cannot' take Chemistry 1, the beginners' course.

But consider the conditions.

We are the only department of physical or natural science which optimistically furnishes a course connecting directly with and continuous from the entrance requirements.

At the time of writing we have 405 eleotions, all in laboratory courses. Will the reader reflect for a moment upon the attention to business necessary to keep the various sections working smoothly.

We have 115 in advanced courses - that is, belond 4 and 4a, beyond two years' study, a number that cannot be equalled by any two other science departments in the College. These courses are obviously more exacting, more individual in the manner of their instruction than the earlier courses. We have not been forced to put any other regular limitation than qualification upon them yet, but they are carried along with difficulty and soon must be limited, the number- coming up from the lower courses continues to augment.

We have five instructors in the department, or one instructor for 81 students. This is from one point of view a fair mode of statement, since one instructor does have oversight of 81 students, on the average, and we have no large lecture courses without laboratory work to fatten the average. But to reduce to a comparative college basis we will assume that we have only one-fifth of the work of each student; then the ratio is 1 to 16.2. From the figures given in the Directory for , 1913-1914 it appears that the ratio of the whole institution is one instructor to 11.4 students. It is well recognized that departments with laboratories, in which instruction is largely individual, should live on the other side of the average and have more instructors per student than the average of the institution.

Our largest laboratory contains 84 tables, with double lockers supplemented by 102 detached lockers, of which 30 were tucked into corners and under hoods last fall. It does not seem wise to go beyond 270 lockers in a room where not more than 42 students should work at once in the two-hour shifts. In such a crowd one man without a locker might be the beginning of militant communism. But whenever the numbers in Chemistry 1, 3, 3a and 2d year medical course exceed 270, something must give way; and (without counting the Freshmen who would elect Chemistry 1 if they could) we have at the present time 292 in those courses.

We have one lecture room containing 106 seats, of which two are behind posts, and we have 106 elections in Chemistry 1,the course that should be open to Freshmen. And when the seats are filled there are about 194 cubic feet of air to each occupant.

We have no recitation room. One of the laboratories has about 24 chairs; the library can seat eight or ten; we can use the quiz rooms under the roof for written work in two divisions of 60 each, 120 at one time, but the rooms are impossible for recitations.

There is not a foot of private laboratory space for graduate students or instructors. In the Journal of the American Chemical Society for April, 1913, is a paper by Professors Bolser and Richardson on "An Ester of Hydrocobalticyanic Acid." You do not take it with you for vacation reading, gentle reader; but it comes from much experimental investigation, all of which was done in public laboratories where the apparatus was set up and taken down between classes. And on one occasion a student "who did not mean any harm" destroyed the scanty product of three months' work by helping himself to a container that he thought he needed more than they.

But every year we offer (and give) courses that taken one 3-hour course at a time would require over ten years, without making account of courses given in the summer session; some years we add the equivalent of two more years to that. And experience shows that our graduates can teach creditably in secondary schools and colleges, do admirable work in the universities, and quickly build on their foundation a great variety of industrial specialties.

By many the Department of Chemistry will be thought worthy of greater opportunity because, with all its other work and all its limitation, it" has been one of the departments of the College fruitful in the development of well-prepared teachers. It is impossible to give any measure of the numbers and success of the teachers in secondary schools through many years. But in a rather casual glance .backwards over the list of college teachers for the last few years, one notes the following names:

1897, C. E. Bolser, 1898, H. W. Goodall, 1898, S. E. Moody, 1900,. L. B. Richardson, 1905, C. N. Moore, 1906, A. D. Holmes, 1907, J. E. W. Glattfeld, 1907, R. T. Stokes, 1908, A. A. Eberly, 1908, E. P. Bartlett, 1909, W. J. Lane, 1909, F. B. Plummer, 1910, H. G. Mitchell, 1910, A. J. Scarlett, 1912, E. F. Hartshorn, Dartmouth, Harvard Medical School, Yale and Univ. of Wis., Dartmouth, Research Lab. Gen. Elec. Co., Univ. of Me., Dart., Univ. of Chicago, Hobart, Purdue, Pomona, Conn. Ag. College, Vassar, Univ. of Chicago, Dartmouth, Dartmouth, Dartmouth, Ph.D. Univ. of Goettingen M.D. Harvard Ph.D. Yale A.M. Dart, and U. of Pa. Leipsic Ph.D. Johns Hopkins Ph.D. Univ. of Chicago Harvard Grad. School Univ. of Chicago Columbia S. S., 3 years Columbia Grad. School.

At some time the graduate named has assisted in the instruction in chemistry at the institution in the first column, and has pursued studies at the one mentioned in the second. As this list is only to show that in recent times the department has been making a worthy contribution to advanced teaching, it does not go back of 1897, nor does it take note of the large number .of men who have continued their studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and elsewhere, but not for the purpose of teaching.

What is the present actual damage from insufficient room ?

I place first the exclusion of freshmen from Chemistry 1, the beginners' course. This is contrary to the working theory of the College, which is, to take all the qualified men who come. We cannot tell how many desirable men it keeps away; but those to whom it is a serious matter do not come at all, if they find out in time.

The occasional slight limitation of other courses is not as yet a conspicuous evil; it usually applies to. students who did not make their elections at the proper time, or who attempt late changes. The evil is in not making the limitation.

Next is the overcrowding .of the organic laboratory. It would be difficult to find greater efficiency in this or any other College than is displayed in the management of the organic courses; but the conditions are not safe; students should not be doubled at tables for work which is often continuous over several days; the instructor should not be driven to find time for two divisions where only one can be scheduled; one instructor, with a small part of the time of another, is not enough for 70 men making organic preparations.

The large divisions of the earlier courses, sometimes as many as 50 in recitation and laboratory, are not in accordance with the views of the department upon proper methods of instruction. The lack of ventilation in the laboratory used for these courses is apparent to every one who enters the building and is sometimes the occasion for merry, thoughtless jests; but the jesters forget that while the students can escape at the end of two hours, the instructors must stay there all day.

It is true that the courses in the quantitative laboratory are usually over elected and reduced in number, the reduction however, is not arbitrary, but is based upon a necessary qualification. This course—Chemistry 7—is offered after at, least two years of chemistry and the department cannot yield any modification of two essentials—work for the most part individual, and time at the student's option within reasonable limits. The student must have a table of his own and access to it at all times within reason; and since upon that basis students, more or less, will be in the laboratory all the time that it is open, an instructor must be at hand all the time, too. To take more students than there are tables means injury to the work of all the other students. In a short time, under present conditions, there must be an arbitrary limit to this courser" It would be necessary at present if all students who wish to elect this course could tell what percent a is of .b, or where to place the decimal point when .25 is divided by 25. We have found from long experience that under present methods of admission to College many get in who are appallingly incompetent in plain arithmetic. Now quantitative analysis proceeds from the experimental data by arithmetic of simple nature—ratio and proportion, percentage, and the use of common logarithms; and whatever may be said about the theoretical beauty of the "right method" of calculation, the right result of calculation is1 more convenient. We find so many students unable to make the daily calculations —to multiply, divide and add correctly, to state the proportion or the percentage problem, to place that small but bewildering dot known as the "decimal point," with any more logical accuracy than the blindfolded player places the donkey's tail in the well-known competitive sport, that it has become necessary to demand working knowledge of arithmetic and to test it. It is true that if we place the passing mark in such a test as high as SO percent, it is not necessarily otherwise to limit numbers. But if we had a laboratory as large as the gymnasium we should continue to _ apply the test, and on the other hand, it is in the power of aspirants to the course to make the test of no limiting effect by the simple device of meeting it.

There are more diffuse and constructive damages that do not so much affect the student directly as increase the strain upon the instructors.

The administrative side needs both relief and improvement; the business correspondence, the care of the library, the operation of the store-room belong now to a larger business than has been provided for.

Courses in Physical and Electrical Chemistry should be established; we know where good men are in training for this work, but if we had instructors with time, we should have no space for them.

We should like to develop, in conjunction with the Thayer School, a relating to chemical production on the commercial scale.

We need enlarged space everywhere. The library and the balance room are mere examples of the inelastic tension.

Over-crowding in laboratory courses is a distinct disadvantage not only to the last student to enter the course, but to all. And, on the other hand, the last student who offers to enter the course, in accordance with the regulations of the College, has equal rights with the first; and his disappointment and disad vantage, if he is rejected from lack of space, is not made less individual and acute by pointing out to him that many others have been accommodated.

The plain fact is that instructors who expect to do large work with long hours and many students should have even better relative conditions for their worK than those who have short hours and few students.

What are the possible remedies ? More instructors? We need them; but at the present time, without more rooms, we should hardly know how to use them to the best advantage.

Shall the upper floors of Culver, now used for general quiz rooms, be equipped for the special purposes of the department of Chemistry? We say this should be done only as a last desperate resort; because of the excessive cost of the elaborate plumbing, new floors and hoods; because of the uncomfortable summer temperature and the increased fire risk under the mansard roof, because of the inconvenient result, disproportioned, remote and difficul of administration.

Shall we have an addition to the present building? We have floor plans drawn several years ago, showing how an addition directly in the rear of Culver Hall might be brought into co-ordination with the existing building and relieve the pressure for the present. We do not desire it, as it would stand in the way of full and proper provision for the department. For it $70,000 to $80,000 would be needed.

A new building is the only complete and satisfactory remedy, and it would be forthcoming if it were generally realized how much work is being done in the department and what opportunity there is for more. It calls for $250,000, about $180,000 for the building, and the balance, for maintenance.

We have reached the limit of any but 'personal progress under present conditions.