CHEMICAL INDUSTRY. 225 



CHAPTER XIII. 

 Chemieal Industry. 



IN a statistical article the terra < chemical industry » may either mean the exclusive 

 production of acids, alkalis, salts like alum, blue copperas, chromates and phar- 

 maceutical products like ethers and cosmetics; or else in a wider sense it may 

 embrace many manufactures in which chemical actions and processes are taken ad- 

 vantage of, to obtain substances of the greatest variety, starting from dyes and 

 ending with molasses, alcohol, illuminating gas, and the products of dry distillation. 

 Although the manufacture of dyes is included in the present article, still « chemical 

 industry » is understood in the lirst and more limited sense, not only because many 

 of the manufactures founded upon chemical reactions are considered in the other 

 sections of this work, but also chiefly because the manufacture of acids, alkalis and 

 salts, like the alums and chromates, together with the preparation of dyes, forms 

 quite a separate industry, whose products, although seldom met with in every day 

 life, are indispensable to a mukitude of industries and manufactures, and hence indi- 

 rectly indicate the general state of the development of these industries. Moreover, in 

 a number of chemical works the preparation of dyes is carried on simultaneously 

 with the manufacture of acids and salts, and it is frequently impossible to separate 

 the statistics of the one from those of the other. 



When the industrial activity of the Russian nation was exclusively devoted to 

 agriculture, then there were no real chemical manufactures in the Empire, and only a 

 very few of the allied industries, such as distillery works, the preparation of tar and of 

 certain dyes, for instance, madder, which on a small rural scale were carried on, not in 

 works but only in the villages. To the present day the greater portion of the wood 

 tar and resin is produced by industries having the same rural character. This is es- 

 pecially the case in the forests of northern Eussia, which from ancient times have 

 supplied many goods of this kind to the interior of Eussia and abroad (Section VIII). 

 But a true chemical industry, mainly treating substances of the mineral kingdom, 

 only began to develop in Eussia since the demand for those products arose with 



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