THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 24, 1906.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXIX, Issue 8244, 24 September 1906, Page 4

THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 24, 1906.

The last quarter of a century presents no more salient feature than the enormous expansion of chemistry, both pure and applied. Science has not only made great advances upon what used to be considered its own proper lineß, but has invaded large adjacent areas. Bacteriology alone, depending upon a combination of the methods of the chemist and the physiologist, has conferred incalculable benefits, and enters into the daily lives of all of us to an extent which few perhaps adequately realise. By its aid London, using its natural but inevitably contaminated sources of water sup-

ply, has enjoyed a long immunity from water-borne epidemics. 16 oheapens our food, both animal and ▼egetable, by showing how to preserve the one, and how to deal with the enemies that assail the other. It renders possible, by its services tu sanitation, the continued existence in good health of the huge aggregates of human beings In our great towhh. It adds at once to our wealth and to the amenities of life by introducing scientific precision into numerous commercial processes formerly conducted precariously fay rule of'thumb. It has shown us the nature ai'd origin of man? deadly diseases, and hua taught us their prevention and even their cure, a natural extension of its methods has conferred a new insight into the processes of life, and into the intimate structure of the human frame. The chemist has learned a new chemistry more suotle than that of his laboratory. In miorosoopioal specks of matter, once thought structureless, he ; finds the ! most amazing power of complex synI fchesie, building up from the oommon elements around us produots as potent as the poison of the cobra. From that it is but a step to the discovery in the human body of billions of microscopic corpuscles similarly engaged, and of glands once, and not so long ago, merrily exoised by the surgeon as useless, but in reality producing substances absolutely indispensable. In this single department of research the last twenty-five years have effected a revolution immediately concerning every one of us, in health and in disease, in comfort and in purse. Yet we stand only upon the fchres hold of a new and wonderful world. Behind the microscopic corpuscle is the unimagined structure by which it manufactures its enzyme, or ferment, or opsonin, or whatever we choose to call it. Behind the microscopic cell is the yet minuter nucleus, aud behind that again ia a vista of infinitesimals in the presence of which the imagination reels.