10 



Vistas in Silk and Ramie 



WHEN William J. Hale, in 1934, coined the descriptive 

 word "chemurgy" meaning agricultural production for 

 industrial uses the South found itself in the singular 

 position of the bourgeois gentilhomme who was per- 

 fectly astounded to learn that he had been talking 

 French prose all his life. The South had been practic- 

 ing chemurgy since colonial times, making its liveli- 

 hood chiefly out of it. Its two greatest crops, cotton and 

 tobacco, have long been the greatest chemurgic crops 

 grown in America. 



Although the birthplace and headquarters of chem- 

 urgy in the United States, the South resembled that 

 would-be gentleman rather startlingly. Just as he knew 

 no grammar or syntax, so the South never recognized 

 one of the first principles of growing crops to feed mod- 

 ern factories. Our cotton and tobacco growers have no 

 monopoly on this lack of perception. It is shared by the 

 rubber planters in Malaya, the Argentine linseed grow- 

 ers, the Russian hemp farmers, by all agriculturists the 

 world over. 



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