Surrounded by automated analytical devices, computer-driven spectroscopes, and other high tech apparatus, anyone practicing chemistry today would think that he or she had little in common with what passed for a chemist in the 3rd century AD-- even the WWII generation seems hopelessly archaic. The illustrations accompanying El Khadem's article (page 774 and cover) provide a reality check for this outlook. At first glance they seem to be charming, ornamental drawings of unknown devices. A quick blink of the eye, however, and they start looking strangely familiar. Old friends such as a fractional distillation column and a digestion vessel emerge from the calligraphy. Most amazing, these drawings come from a 12th century book that contains an Arabic translation of a book written around 300 AD by Zosimos, a gnostic philosopher. The original text was thought lost and the discovery of this translation provides an important insight into experimental practice in both the 4th and 12th centuries. The author (who also is the discoverer of this text) gives the highlights of its contents and relates them to some modern practices. It is fascinating to realize that, while the underlying theories of the composition of matter have changed radically, almost 1700 years have done little to change actual experimental processes such as distillation. Or perhaps it is not so startling when one considers that the nature of chemical reactions have not themselves changed in that period, only the way we explain them.

If we can find something enlightening in a 1700-year-old document, it should be no stretch of the imagination at all to believe we can find something useful in the texts of the last century. Mahaffy's (page 767) examination of major 19th century textbooks reveals that the format of current textbooks directly descends from these early prototypes. The details of the material and the superficial elements of graphics and typefaces are very different, but the teachers of the last century were also struggling with the appropriate way to present science to their prospective audiences. The beginnings of the debates that continue to this day are evident in the words of those authors and in the structures of their texts.

The historical past gives us long-range perspective on our chemical roots and how chemistry has developed into a professional science: much has changed but much has remained the same. Fractional distillation is still with us; sometimes the way Zosimos did it and sometimes in fancier guises such as cracking towers and gas chromatography. This same evolutionary process is apparent in the shorter term as well; many experiments and demonstrations have been recycled with each advance in technology or equipment or in response to changing economic and social factors. Several articles in this issue reflect these kinds of development.

The ammonia fountain is a venerable demonstration that still delights beginning students and their teachers; Li and Peng (page 828) show how to produce the fountain using a commonly available syringe and thus bypass the need for a formal laboratory bench set-up.

The first experiment in the introductory laboratory is often a synthesis of a binary compound. DeMeo (page 836) suggest that the synthesis and decomposition of zinc sulfide is a far better system for this initial experiment than the traditional copper sulfide or magnesium oxide. He outlines both the procedure and the advantages of this approach.

The extraction of caffeine from tea has become as traditional in the organic lab as the simple compound synthesis is in the introductory course, and it too is the subject of a revision in an article in this issue. There has been mounting concern over the use of chloroform or dichloromethane as the extracting agent; Murray and Hansen (page 851) did an organized search for a suitable replacement and discovered 1-propanol could be used successfully with modification of the procedure. Practically everything chemists do have some ties to the distant and recent past; it would be difficult to assess where we are without a look at where we have been. Thus, a current assessment of the state of research in academe requires a careful examination of statistics for the past few years. Hercules (page 782) has compiled an exhaustive database of information on recent research activity of all PhD-granting institutions. He then uses this to assess the productivity of departments and rank them by both activity and productivity. The information in his paper presents a panoramic snapshot in time of the graduate chemical education and research effort in this country and the evolutionary way it changes.