CHEMICAL TREASURE TROVE 



raries say that this is high, since he is comparing Texas 

 with northern Michigan where at both ends conditions 

 are extreme, but at least the saving is substantial. 



These climatic advantages are enticing and profitable. 

 They make a persuasive appeal to those who know that 

 in the big half -moon from Jacksonville to Corpus Christi 

 is the most complete collection of chemical raw mate- 

 rials on earth. Over a century ago a brilliant Irishman, 

 who was the father of the English chemical industry, 

 said, "The foundations of my business rest on salt, lime, 

 and sulfur, and the greatest of these is sulfur." No other 

 region combines these three basic inorganic chemical 

 materials in such abundance. 



Sulfur, melted underground with hot water, is 

 pumped in golden streams from half a dozen great 

 deposits scattered from the marshy bayous of the lower 

 Mississippi Delta all along the flat coastal plains of 

 Texas. Beneath the whole Gulf Coast lie colossal beds 

 of pure rocksalt. Time and again wildcatters for oil 

 have bored for a thousand feet into these beds, and 

 disgusted, drawn their drills still in the salt. Limestone 

 is barged down the Mississippi from Alabama, or better, 

 the Gulf Coast is fringed with great reefs of oystershells, 

 beds of almost pure calcium carbonate, to be dredged 

 up in two-ton clamshell buckets. 



Close by in New Mexico is potash. In Florida, Ten- 

 nessee, and South Carolina is phosphate rock. Both are 

 raw materials for fertilizers and for an increasing num- 



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