244 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1914. 
in which he was compelled to carry on his research; and this was 
then the condition of affairs of no less a place than Paris, the same 
Paris that was spending, just at that time, endless millions for the 
building of her new Opera Palace. 
Such facts should not be overlooked by those who might think that 
America has been too slow in fostering chemical research. 
If the United States has not participated as early as some European 
countries in the development of industrial chemistry, this was chiefly 
because conditions here were so totally different from those of nations 
like Germany, England, and France that they did not warrant any 
such premature efforts. 
In a country so full of primary resources, agriculture, forests, 
mines, and the more elementary industries directly connected there- 
with, as well as the problems of transportation, appealed more 
urgently to American intellectual men of enterprise. 
Why should anybody here have tried to introduce new, difficult, 
or risky chemical industries when on every side more urgently im- 
portant fields of enterprise were inviting all men of initiative ? 
Chemical industries develop along the lines furnished by the most 
immediate needs of a country. Our sulphuric acid industry, which 
can boast to-day of a yearly production of about 3,000,000 tons, had 
to begin in an exceedingly humble way, and the first small amounts 
of sulphuric acid manufactured here found a very scant outlet. 
It required the growth of such fields of application as petroleum 
refining, superphosphates, explosives, and others, before the sulphuric 
acid industry could grow to what it is to-day. 
At present, similar influences are still dominating our chemical 
industries; they are generally directed to the mass production of 
partly manufactured articles. This allows us to export, at present, 
to Germany, chemicals in crude form, but in greater value than the 
total sum of all the chemical products we are importing from her; 
although it can not be denied that a considerable part of our imports 
-are products like alizarine, indigo, aniline dyes, and similar synthetic 
products which require higher chemical manufacturing skill. 
In this connection it may be pointed out that our exports of 
oleomargarine to Germany alone are about equivalent to our imports 
of aniline dyes. 
But all this does not alter the fact that in several important chemical 
industries the United States has been a pioneer. Such flourishing 
enterprises as that of the artificial abrasives, carborundum and 
alundum, calcium carbide, aluminum, and many others, testify 
how soon we have learned to avail ourselves of some of our water 
power. 
One of the most important chemical industries of the world, the 
sulphite cellulose industry, of which the total annual production 
