The Chemist as Creator 759 



Now the great natural source of potash is at Stassfurt in 

 Germany a vast bed where the evaporation of sea-water floods 

 left in bygone millennia crystalline deposits of the salts which 

 had been dissolved out from ancient rocks, and left them well 

 arranged! In 1913 the United States imported a million tons 

 of Stassfurt salts for which the farmers paid over 20 million 

 dollars. Obviously the potash supply has had to be looked for 

 somewhere else, and the chemist has to lead the search. There 

 are abundant salts of potassium in the rocks, e.g. the felspar of 

 granite, but the difficulty is to get the potash out or to get it out 

 cheaply enough. As Dr. Slosson says in his inimitable way, "A 

 farmer with his potash locked up in silicates is like the merchant 

 who has left the key of his safe at home in his other trousers. He 

 may be solvent but he cannot meet a sight draft. It is only 

 solvent potash that passes current." Use is now made of the 

 potash in wood ashes, the potash in the waste liquor of beet 

 molasses, the potash in seaweeds, and so on, but the potash prob- 

 lem remains unsolved outside Germany. 



Wealth out of Waste 



In many cases, as we have seen, the chemist made a new 

 thing, such as chloroform ; in many cases he made an old natural 

 product in a new artificial way, as in the case of indigo; but in 

 other cases his ingenuity has taken the form of discovering a use 

 for what was previously regarded as worthless. Let us take a 

 few examples. For many a year no one thought of utilising the 

 cotton-seed that used to be thrown away or burned when the 

 precious fibre was collected. Nowadays it is used in half a hun- 

 dred ways yielding cotton-meal for cattle and oil for table use, 

 writing-paper and putty, fertilisers and soap, varnishes and 

 smokeless powder! Even from such an apparently trivial source 

 as the seeds of the tomato-fruit, formerly discarded in the can- 

 ning factory, there can be extracted over 20 per cent, of an edible 

 oil. The chemist has led the world to a new economy. 



