CHEMISTRY AND CIVILIZATION 163 



pound, and could be omitted with the same impunity as could 

 the magic incantations of the alchemists. 



Lavoisier perished in the French Revolution; but this 

 same political upheaval gave an indirect impetus to chemical 

 manufacture in the modern sense. For the ensuing wars, with 

 their commercial reprisals which cut off both France and 

 England from their existing sources of supply, stimulated 

 attempts to substitute artificial for natural commodities, and 

 the governments offered premiums for the invention of pro- 

 cesses which would manufacture articles at home that were 

 heretofore imported from the colonies or abroad. Hence arose 

 the beet-sugar industry, and the Leblanc process for making 

 artificial soda, to replace the ashes of wood and seaweed no 

 longer available in sufficient quantities for the making of glass, 

 soap, etc. The Leblanc process, however, called for a plenti- 

 ful supply of cheap sulphuric acid and liberated large quan- 

 tities of hydrochloric acid, for which an outlet was found in 

 the production of chlorine and bleaching-powder for the textile 

 industries. To this day, soda manufacture and its allied in- 

 duction may be considered the foundation of all chemical 

 technology, of which the beet-sugar process is the first example 

 of the production in bulk of an organic compound by a com- 

 plicated series of steps which could never be carried on suc- 

 cessfully on a small scale. Up to the end of the eighteenth 

 century, chemicals were made by the pound, since then by 

 the ton. 



Of course, many other causes have succeeded this political 

 impetus as stimulants to chemical industry: mechanical 

 inventions, in connection with the employment of steam as 

 a motive power; the influence of railroads and steamships in 

 facilitating the collection of raw materials and finished pro- 

 ducts; the discovery of great ore-bodies, of petroleum fields 

 and vast coal-beds; finally, the conversion of mechanical 



