PUBLISHED BY THE ALUMNI ASSOCIATION 

 OF THE COLLEGE OF PHARMACY OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK. 



Vol. II. 



New York, March, 1895. 



No. 3. 



CHEMISTRY IN THE UTILIZATION OF RAW MATERIALS 



BY PROF. ARTHUR H. ELLIOTT. 



Ladies a?id Gentlemen: 



I feel very much in the position of a 

 speaker at a public dinner who has been 

 given a toast and then utterly fails to be 

 in sympathy with his toast. Now, it is 

 exactly my position that I am to talk 

 about waste materials in Chemistry and 

 there is no waste the chemist is not capa- 

 ble of utilizing in some shape or form; 

 but I would rather say I will give you a 

 running commentary upon the applica- 

 tions of Chemistry to the uses of various 

 Raw Materials and the products inci- 

 dental to their manufacture. 



I suppose there is probably no similar 

 area of the earth's surface that is richer 

 in resources fitted to the use and comfort 

 of man as is the -United States. When 

 our forefathers came here, they found the 

 land sufficient to sustain themselves and 

 their families by the very simplest meth- 

 ods of agriculture, and when we think 

 this is only about two or three hundred 

 years ago it is not uninteresting to note 

 that the once rich soil of Massachusetts 

 no longer exists, and that it is only by 

 the most careful efforts on the part of the 



LIBRARY 

 NEW YO^ 

 BOTANIC, 



agriculturist that the soil of the NevfcAK 

 England States is made to give a profit- 

 able crop. 



When we further note that the profit- 

 able areas of agriculture are now located 

 West of the Mississippi and Northwest of 

 that region, we are led to ask the ques- 

 tion, what have we done with the soil 

 that so readily sustained and supplied 

 our ancestors, that to-day it is difficult to 

 get a living from it? To those who have 

 studied this question, it is readily an- 

 swered in the fact that we have taken 

 everything that we could get from it, and 

 put nothing back to take the place of the 

 material we have removed. As most of 

 you are aware, the larger part of the 

 plant life that constitutes the basis of 

 vegetable life is taken from the atmos- 

 phere under the influence of sunlight and 

 heat, but there is an underlying basic 

 principle of earthy matter which is taken 

 from the soil and is essential to plant 

 life, just as much as the bones of our own 

 bodies are essential to our lives, in fact 

 the plants could no more live than we 

 do without these mineral substances that 



♦Lecture delivered under the auspices of the Alumni Association of the College of Pharmacy of the City of New 

 York on Wednesday evening, Feb. 13, 1895. 



