OTHER CHEMURGIC PROJECTS 



in Abilene. You must coax out of Lundell by patient 

 questioning half of what he is doing as director of the 

 Institute of Technology and Plant Industry at the South- 

 ern Methodist University. 



Ray is convinced that we are passing up two great 

 fiber plants in the agave, which the Mexicans use in 

 making their potent drink pulque, and in the nolina, a 

 rank- growing, grasslike plant of many species. His 

 darling is the sotol, a vegetable jack-of -all-trades. It 

 belongs to the lily family and its starchy bulb is edible. 

 It has a treelike growth with a trunk that in some species 

 is three feet in diameter, which is a source of alcohol. 

 Its leaves, sometimes six feet long and generally about 

 half an inch wide, are used by the Indians to thatch 

 roofs and make baskets. Maybe Ray has something 

 there. 



At the time of our rubber crisis the Government sent 

 Lundell down into Mexico exploring for latex-bearing 

 species. He found some none exceptional but he also 

 brought back a number of credible commercial pros- 

 pects. These he is cultivating in an experimental plant- 

 ing of chemurgic novelties. Some of his most promising 

 candidates are the garcia, an evergreen tree from Mex- 

 ico, easy to grow and producing an oil said to surpass 

 tung in its drying properties; the jojoba, whose edible 

 seeds produce fifty per cent of an oily wax used during 

 the war in shoe polishes, and which is already being 

 cultivated on a six-hundred acre plantation in Arizona 



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