I CANNOT complain if the address which I delivered a few weeks ago to the Institute of Chemistry, although it received an extent of encomium for which I was quite unprepared, should meet here and there with adverse, not to say unfriendly, criticism. Naturally enough, the inculcation of sturdy self reliance displeasing to the new apostolate of sponging upon others, though it scarcely, I think, justifies a resort to the dialectic juggle of representing the defence of one side of a chemist's duty as meant to be a deliberate expression of “the whole duty of a chemist.” The Chemical Society takes cognisance of chemists in one aspect of their work, the Institute of Chemistry takes cognisance of the same individuals in another aspect; and one really need not be a conjuror, though it may put some strain the fair mindedness of an editor, to perceive that an address intended for the one organisation would be unsuitable for the other. That distinguished man, the late Dr. James Young, F. R. S., whom you so complacently sneer at, was not a professional chemist at all, but a manufacturing chemist. He was a first-rate manufacturer, whereas Reichenbach was but a third-rate or fourth-rate investigator, if so much and, your opinion notwithstanding, it is commonly held that the first-rateness of the one man in his own walk more than counterbalanced whatever weight attached to the higher walk of the other. I may cite for your information Sir Frederick Abel, Dr. Frankland, Prof. Dewar, and the late Dr. Stenhouse, as being eminent professional chemists. Though of high repute in forensic circles, I am not aware of their being never heard of at the learned Societies; but I am aware that, in common with other leading chemists of the country, they have had the bad taste to be contemptuous of your own contributions to chemical science. Can it really be that this circumstance has affected unconsciously the spirit of your leading article? I would suggest, moreover, for your editorial consideration, that to supplement criticism of an author's performance with flippant insinuations as to his personal conduct and career, is hardly in accordance with the best traditions of scientific journalism; while it constitutes undeniably bad art, as implying that the production criticised did not of itself afford adequate opportunity for attack, even, of course, with an editor's happy privilege of misrepresentation. As regards the reflections so unmistakably made on myself personally, I have little fear that the irreproachable tone of your remarks will serve to suggest the measure of their trustworthiness; and will only observe “happy are they that hear their detractions, and can put them to mending.” As regards, how ever, your disparagement of the chemical profession at large, from which, I trust, it may not suffer beyond hope of recovery, I would venture to remind you that even that other profession, of which you are so magnanimous a member, has had its calumniators; and the words of a well-known satirist of the last century are considered by some to be as applicable now as ever, that “Of all the cants which are canted in this canting world, the cant of criticism is the most tormenting.” Sterne was, happily, unacquainted with the cant of scientific mendicancy, or he might have added that that also was a very fine cant in its way.