Abstract
THE seventy-fifth annual general meeting of the Society was held on March 9 in the meeting room of the Royal Society, Burlington House, London, W.I, with the retiring president, Mr. Lewis Eynon, in the chair. In his address, Mr. Eynon began by remarking on the Society's membership of 1,500, a doubling of the figure of ten years ago ; he announced that, in alternate years in which no change of president occurs, the lecture which is delivered at the annual general meeting will in future be known as the Bernard Dyer Memorial Lecture, in honour of the late Dr. Bernard Dyer. The main theme of Mr. Eynon's address was the fundamental importance of analysis to the progress of chemistry and the necessity for giving a prominent place to analysis in the training of the student of chemistry. He said that although two former presidents of the Society had both deplored the inadequacy of training in analytical chemistry, little advance has been made in the status of analysis as a subject of instruction in the universities and technical colleges of Great Britain; indeed, the position has if anything become worse owing to the increasing claims of other branches of the science on a student's time. The great utilitarian value of training in analysis is too obvious and manifold when one considers its application to industry, medicine, water supply and Government inspection. The most important practicable step is for the establishment of chairs of analytical chemistry in universities and colleges and for a longer period of training for the student. With the present unsatisfactory conditions of training there is a serious danger that within the next twenty years the analyst himself will be "weighed in the balance and found wanting".
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Society of Public Analysts and other Analytical Chemists. Nature 163, 477 (1949). https://doi.org/10.1038/163477b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/163477b0