CHEMISTRY IN THE UNITED STATES 85 



artificial refrigeration and their manufacturing of lard, lard 

 and butter substitutes, meat extracts, pepsin, and fertilizers, 

 all employ skilled chemists and pro\dde well equipped lab- 

 oratories. In the making of steel and iron the processes are 

 followed by anal5'ses from start to finish, from ore, fuel, and 

 flux, to the completed billets; and the chemists who are thus 

 occupied have gained marvelous dexterity. The analytical 

 methods have been reduced to great precision, and are extra- 

 ordinary as regards speed, work which once required a day 

 to perform being now executed in less than twenty minutes. 

 Exact measurement has replaced rule of thumb, certainty has 

 supplanted probabihty, industry has become less wasteful 

 and surer of a fair return, and to all this the chemist has been 

 the chief contributor. 



Without his aid the manufactures of the world could 

 never have been developed to their present magnitude and 

 efficiency. His influence reaches even beyond the furnace 

 or the factory and touches the greatest economic questions. 

 Take, for example, the financial agitation through w^hich our 

 country has so recently passed, with its discussion of monetary 

 ratios. Chemical processes have profoundly modified the 

 metallurgy of gold and silver, cheapening the production of 

 both metals and changing the commercial ratio of their values. 

 Can the bimetalhc question be intelligently investigated with 

 the chemical factor left out? Furthermore, chemistry has 

 created new industries in which both gold and silver are em- 

 ployed, and so, affecting both supply and demand, touches 

 their ratios still more deepl}^ When politics becomes true to 

 its definition, when it is really the science and art of govern- 

 ment, then we may expect politicians to consider questions 

 like these and to study the evidence which chemistry has to 

 offer. 



One other phase of appHed chemistry, chiefly developed 

 in this country, remains to be mentioned. In 1875 the Penn- 

 sylvania railroad company opened a laboratory at Altoona, 

 in charge of Dr. C. B. Dudley; and eight or nine other rail- 

 roads have since followed its lead. In these railroad labora- 

 tories, which employ many men, all sorts of supplies are 

 tested, and large contracts for purchases depend upon the 



