OTHER CHEMURGIC PROJECTS 



most painful in an area where industrial plants are few 

 and far between and where the country, though inimit- 

 ably beautiful, is much too rugged for profitable agri- 

 culture. 



The problems raised by our vanishing chestnuts are 

 also national. Within ten or a dozen years, so the experts 

 tell us, there will be no domestic supply of chestnut 

 whatever. It is unwise to be so dependent upon imports 

 of such a vital industrial material as tanning extracts, 

 but it becomes downright improvident when we know 

 that the future supply of the foreign material is itself 

 uncertain. We have long supplemented native chestnut 

 chiefly by quebracho from Argentina and again the 

 experts warn us that in twenty-five years the accessible 

 native trees will be cut down. Since the quebracho is 

 small and slow-growing, the prospects are not good. 



Facing these facts, the General Education Board of 

 the Rockefeller Foundation decided in 1940 to make 

 funds available for a thoroughgoing scientific survey 

 of the natural tanning materials of the South. Alfred 

 Russell of the Chemistry Department of the University 

 of North Carolina was selected to execute this good 

 idea. It was a tough assignment, for it meant timber- 

 cruising an area of some 468,000 square miles from the 

 soaking, subtropical jungles of southern Florida to the 

 steep, wind-swept flanks of the highest mountains east 

 of the Mississippi. Along with physical hardihood the 

 tanstuffs hunter must bring to this job a working knowl- 



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