News and Notes. 319 



threaten to curtail the work under way and the development of 

 new plants. At the present time three conditions, two of them 

 actual and one threatened, are confronting the wood preserving 

 people. The two actual conditions are an increase in the price of 

 British creosote, amounting to about one cent a gallon, and a very- 

 marked advance in ocean freight rates, the price on tank steamer 

 charters to American ports having increased as much as six-fold 

 in the last year. The inevitable result is that the American con- 

 sumers, since their oil requirements cannot be met by the domestic 

 producers, must pay materially more for creosote, which leads 

 either to a curtailment in the amount of material treated, a lessen- 

 ing of the amount of oil injected, or, in a few cases, the shutting 

 down of plants. On top of this comes a provision in the Chemical 

 Bill before the Senate imposing a duty of five per cent, on creosote, 

 which would still further increase the price. The question of 

 duty was up some two years ago, when an attempt was made to 

 impose the twenty per cent, called for in existing schedules on 

 manufactured creosote. A muck-raking magazine came out with 

 a scare article on how the Government was being defrauded by 

 the corporations and urging the collection of 20% duty on all 

 imported creosote. This was all very well, but the writer failed 

 to distinguish between the manufactured creosote used for tooth- 

 ache and the by-product creosote imported for wood preserving 

 purposes. The presence of a fraction of a per cent, of chlorine 

 in a cargo or two of oil was made the basis for a claim that creo- 

 sote is a manufactured product, since chlorine is not present in 

 coal gas tar. The amount of chlorine revealed on analysis was 

 so slight as to be insignificant, and its presence was easily ex- 

 plained by the washing down of the tanks by sea water and by 

 chemical conditions arising in the by-products distillation. Since 

 the domestic by-product ovens are able to produce less than 30%, 

 or only about 18 million out of the 63 million gallons of creosote 

 used annually in the United States, and as the domestic producers 

 are able to market all of their products at remunerative prices, to 

 impose a duty would not only hamper an important industry, but 

 would curtail a work which perhaps more than any other tends to 

 lessen our timber consumption and conserve our forest resources. 



