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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



world at less than 100,000,000 pounds. This 

 represents 10,000,000 pounds of combined nitro- 

 gen withdrawn yearly from the world's avail- 

 able resources. Translating this into the shape 

 of human food, the annual consumption of gun- 

 powder means the destruction in advance of no 

 less than 500,000,000 pounds of bread. We 

 must remember, too, what this destruction means. 

 If we were to take the ripe crops of wheat 

 in some country to an extent capable of yielding 

 500,000,000 pounds of bread, and if— instead of 

 allowing the grain to be gathered and put through 

 the various processes which fit it for use — we 

 were to have it ploughed into the soil, this con- 

 duct would be pronounced a criminal waste of 

 the means of human subsistence; yet we should 

 in reality have committed, comparatively speak- 

 ing, little destruction. The buried nitrogenous 

 matter would be still available for the growth of 

 crops in succeeding seasons, and our supposed 

 course of action, foolish and reprehensible as it 

 would undoubtedly be, would delay rather than 

 destroy the appearance of such combined nitro- 

 gen as food. But if we work up the combined 

 nitrogen into gunpowder, and explode it, there 

 is not merely delay, but what amounts to de- 

 struction — a destruction going on from year to 

 year, and continually diminishing the amount of 

 food which the earth is capable of yielding. 



These considerations seem to us to supply a 

 new argument against war, to which we would 

 call the attention of such Peace Societies — if any 

 there be — whose hatred of war is logically con- 

 sistent, and is not merely assumed at times to 

 suit the purposes of faction. Hitherto political 

 economists and social reformers, especially of the 

 Malthusian school, have looked upon war as one 

 of the "positive checks" upon the increase of 

 population. While deploring the other evils 

 brought on by international conflicts, they have 

 regarded it as a set-off that every battle must 

 decrease the proportion of eaters to the total 

 amount of food. Had they, before advancing 

 such opinions, taken counsel of the chemist, he 

 would have told them that although their view 

 might have been correct in the olden time, when 

 men shot each other with the gray-goose shaft 

 or cleft each other's skulls with the battle-axe, 

 yet since 



" That villainous saltpetre hath been digged 

 Out of the bowels of the harmless earth," 



the case is totally altered. Our modern battles, 

 how sanguinary soever, reduce the supply of food 

 along with the demand. Every rifle and every 

 cannon discharged may destroy actual life, but 



certainly must destroy the means of life. Each 

 ounce of powder burned means so much more 

 nutriment withdrawn from our crops, so much 

 less bread or beef producible, and so much less 

 human life rendered possible in the future. Spec- 

 ulators on the population question must hence- 

 forth cease to regard war as one of their " positive 

 checks." Indeed, these same " positive checks " 

 are becoming somewhat abridged. War, as we 

 have seen, though waged upon a larger scale than 

 ever, has been converted into an agency of an 

 opposite nature. Pestilence is to be abolished 

 by "sanitary reforms." What remains, then, 

 but famine ? and, unless we cease our systematic 

 waste of the elements of food, that we shall cer- 

 tainly experience. 



We shall, perhaps, understand more clearly 

 the essential antagonism between food-raising and 

 gunpowder-making if we consider the process by 

 which saltpetre was formerly obtained in most 

 countries of Europe. If we, in England, saw less 

 of this operation than did most of our neighbors, 

 it was because we imported the nitre from other 

 parts of the empire, where it was produced sub- 

 stantially on the same principle, even though 

 without the conscious and intentional interven- 

 tion of man. So-called nitre-beds were formed 

 and worked. To make these, earth was collected 

 together from the sides and bottoms of cesspools, 

 drains, urinals, and dunghills. It was mixed with 

 plaster from old walls, and stratified with decay- 

 ing animal and vegetable refuse. These beds or 

 heaps were sheltered as far as possible from cold 

 and rain, and were sometimes watered with urine. 

 In course of time a whitish efflorescence began 

 to appear in different parts of the heap. The 

 earth was then dug up, lixiviated with hot water, 

 and the solution thus obtained on concentration 

 yielded crystals of saltpetre. Now, it is evident 

 that all the substances of which these nitre-beds 

 were formed were in themselves nitrogenous, and 

 capable of being used as manures. What was 

 sold as saltpetre was simply so much robbed 

 from the farm and the garden. As to the com- 

 position of the soil taken from the foundations of 

 cesspools, stables, cow-houses, dunghills, etc., 

 there can be now no doubt. Even the ground 

 all about ordinary dwelling houses was in former 

 days saturated with excrementitious matter. We 

 have adopted another form of waste ; what our 

 forefathers allowed to soak into the earth be- 

 neath and around their houses we run into the 

 streams and seas. Our method may be a little 

 more favorable to health, but it is waste all the 

 same. The great fact that the saltpetre thus ob- 



