PULP, PAPER, AND BY-PRODUCTS 



against a moss-covered log and talked and talked; 

 talked till the chilly evening shadows interrupted them. 

 Both have indignantly denied as apocryphal and scan- 

 dalous the story that most of that afternoon a cock 

 grouse scratched ant eggs around the old stump against 

 which they had propped their guns. But it is well known 

 that the annual hunting parties of these two chemical 

 cronies were more famous for the bag of live ideas than 

 of dead birds. 



Consummate organic chemists, both of them, they 

 naturally talked organic chemistry not the formal 

 chemistry of carbon compounds, but the living chem- 

 istry of farm crops which manufacture out of air, water, 

 and the minerals of the soil, starches, oils, sugars, pro- 

 teins, cellulose. In terms of the miraculous efficiency 

 of the living plant that, with the aid of solar energy, 

 makes these amazingly complicated compounds out 

 of the cheapest, most available raw materials, they pon- 

 dered the age-old farm problem then a blazing political 

 issue and they probed the unsound core of the philos- 

 ophy of scarcity. 



"Henry Wallace plowing under corn and cotton," said 

 Billy Hale, "is exactly like the pet bear who killed a fly 

 on his master's nose with a rock, which cracked his 

 skull." 



"This ascending spiral of higher prices and higher 

 wages," generalized the thoughtful Herty, "ends in- 

 evitably in ruin. More goods sold more cheaply is the 



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