62 SCIENCE REMAKING THE WORLD 



much more than that. As Professor W. A. Noyes 

 recently put it: 



"It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that enough 

 has been saved from this to pay for all the university 

 laboratories in the world." 



Let us consider another famous dye, the royal purple. 

 You may recall what Browning says of it in the poem 

 "Popularity." 



Who has not heard how Tyrian shells 

 Enclosed the blue, that dye of dyes 



Whereof one drop worked miracles, 

 And colored like Astarte's eyes 



Raw silk the merchant sells? 



Now this same royal purple that used to be extracted 

 drop by drop from the Mediterranean mollusc may be 

 made by the ton from coal-tar. Why is it not? Be- 

 cause it is not good enough to satisfy modern taste. 

 Some of the new aniline dyes are superior to it. 



This idea that the coal-tar products are artificial and 

 unnatural sometimes leads to amusing consequences. 

 In the days when the newspapers were publishing scare 

 stories about the poisonousness of benzoic acid, an 

 over-zealous food inspector tried to confiscate a earful 

 of cranberries because he found benzoic acid in them. 

 But when he attempted to get at the person responsible 

 for putting in the forbidden preservative so that He 

 could be properly 'punished, He was found to be too 

 high up and powerful for the police to reach, being no 

 less a personage than the Creator of Heaven and Earth 

 and all that in them is. He puts benzoic acid into cran- 



