SOUTHERN HORIZONS 



super-roller-coaster. The whole trade is as stable as a 

 bowlful of jelly, for the brokers who sell rosin and 

 turpentine here and abroad have little reason to want 

 steady prices. With their inside knowledge, they fre- 

 quently play both ends against the middle and profit 

 most in the up-and-down swings of the highly specula- 

 tive market. 



Plump into the midst of this scattered, happy-go- 

 lucky business jumped an eccentric inventor with a 

 new kind of naval stores plant. It was not a still at all. 

 It did not even work on crude gum. It was a big retort 

 which he filled with chips cut from rich pine stumps. 

 Homer T. Yaryan did not try to distill this mass of 

 wood chips: he heated and softened them with live 

 steam. Then he poured in a solvent which extracted the 

 rosin and turpentine stored in the roots, and also an- 

 other product, pine oil. He separated these three prod- 

 ucts in a modern fractionating still. 



The owners of the little fire-stills laughed at this 

 expensive, complicated contraption. It would never 

 be a competitor of theirs so they thought for it cost 

 too much. Besides it produced a low-grade, dark- 

 colored rosin; a turpentine that had a strange, unpleas- 

 ant smell; and pine oil which at that time nobody on 

 earth wanted. 



But during the past thirty years, that original wood- 

 rosin plant of Yaryan's has grown into a really elaborate 

 aggregation of autoclaves, tall fractionating columns, 



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