LABORATORY. A laboratory is literally a place of labor, a workshop, and the term is still frequently employed in this meaning in connee t ion with the manufacturing cif chemicals. drugs, explosives, etc. The word is ordinarily used, however, to designate a room or building equipped with means for conducting experimental investigations in some department of science or art. Research laboratories of chemistry, physics, engineering, biology, etc., are maintained in all the better colleges and universities, in the inter est of pure and applied science, and in many hospitals. manufacturing establishments, etc., for the purpose of devising new methods of pro cedure and conducting tests of various kinds. In addition to these laboratories devoted to re search, there are numberless laboratories con nected with public and private schools, acade mies. and colleges, whose function is not the dis covery of new truths, but rather the demonstra tion of facts already well established. Every high school. for example. possesses a chemical laboratory in which experiments are performed by students who are led in this way to a first hand and therefore better knowledge of the facts and principles of this science.
The history of research laboratories can lie best understood in the light of the development of all scientific thinking. There is at first a period of crude observation of the facts under the complicated conditions of practical life Such observations have given to science many valuable facts, but serious errors have crept in at the same time. This is naturally followed by a period of reaction against observation and in its stead there is an attempt to deduce all knowledge from already given general laws. This is the period of authority and the syllogism. The re action to this method leads to the third and final stage of science, when the laws and facts of na ture are determined by means of observation of phenomena, hut now under control and known conditions. The sciences have not advanced with equal speed. so that while some are well along in the third of progress and are still growing rapidly through experimental research, other sciences are in the second stage, while a few still remain in the first stage. Laboratories
of some sort have existed since the earliest. times. The Chinese and Egyptians. as well as the Greeks and Romans. ecrtainlv possessed them, hut they were in all probability similar to the Letter known laboratories of the physicians, apothecaries, alchemists, and astrologers of the Aliddle Ages, given over largely to the search for the philosopher's stone, and to the manufac ture of elixirs, drugs, charms, cosmetics. etc. With the fifteenth century came the reaction against Scholasticism; and men began to study nature rather than books, they began to observe rather than to deduce facts and principles, and by the end of the sixteenth century the experi mental method was well established.
In 1589 Galileo demonstrated the necessity of the experimental method at Pisa. Climbing the leaning tower, he let fall a weight of one pound and a weight of one hundred pounds; starting simultaneously, the weights struck the ground together, at once and forever disproving the Aristotelian deduction that the speed of falling bodies was proportional to their weights. Fran cis Bacon, in 16'20, and Comenius, in 1630, set forth arguments for the inductive method and the experimental investigation of facts. But prior to the nineteenth century all laboratories were private institutions devoted wholly to re search. In 1824 Purkinje established a physio logical laboratory in Breslau; in 1825 Liebig es tablished a laboratory of ehemistry, medicine, and physiology in Giessen; in 1845 Lord Kelvin —then Thomson—opened a physical laboratory in the University of Glasgow; in 1849 a pharmacological laboratory was created by Buchheim; in ]S56 Virchow opened a pathologi cal laboratory in Berlin. As the work of the laboratories has developed, there has come about a specialization of the problems to be under taken. and as a result new research laboratories are founded every year.
Laboratories for instruction do not differ ma te•ially from research laboratories as far as equipment and method is concerned.