344 SCIENCE PROGRESS. 



remunerative, whilst the original madder dyes, although 

 produced in larger quantity than ever, are made at slight 

 profit owing to the excessive competition that has arisen. 



Now artificially made dyes have all but displaced 

 natural colouring matters, indigo excepted, even among so 

 conservative a people as our Indian subjects, and the 

 industry is of enormous importance, although not to us. 

 We are so much behindhand in the race that there is little 

 chance of our regaining a good place in the list of runners, 

 even if we go fully into training with that object. 



And not only dye stuffs are made from coal-tar. A 

 whole list of substances of the greatest value in medicine 

 are also now prepared from raw materials derived from 

 tar ; some of these have proved to be most efficient substi- 

 tutes for quinine, and the growth of cinchona bark in India 

 and Ceylon has consequently ceased to be the remunerative 

 pursuit it was. All such substances have been the outcome 

 of researches carried out in the German Universities, or in 

 the still more highly equipped laboratories of the German 

 chemical works. Moreover, of late years, Nature's per- 

 fumes have one after the other been forced to disclose 

 their character to the pertinacious inquirer, and have been 

 claimed as victims by the chemical manufacturer — abroad, 

 although here again the example was first set by Perkin, 

 who in 1868 showed how Coumarin, the odoriferous 

 principle of the Tonka bean, might be artificially prepared. 



If we seek to understand our early success as well as 

 our later failure in the branch of industry of which I have 

 been speaking, it is not difficult to trace the former to 

 Hofmann's influence and the latter to our want of apprecia- 

 tion of the inestimable value of the services of such a man. 

 In this connection I may be allowed to quote from my 

 Presidential Address to the Chemical Society in 1894 the 

 following passage in reference to the then recently published 

 memoir by _ Dr. Caro on the development of the coal-tar 

 colour industry :— 



"To those who can understand it, the story told by 

 Caro is nothing less than an epic, but it is one the contem- 

 plation of which must in many ways sadden an Englishman, 



