26 JOURNAL AND PROCEEDINGS 
CHEMISTRY APPLIED TO INDUSTRY. 
F Read before the Hamilton Association, January 19, 1905, by 
CHAS. B. FOX, B.A. « 
Mr. President and Members of the Hamilton Scientific Associa- 
tion: 
It was with some diffidence that I consented, on the request 
of your Secretary, to prepare a paper for this Association. The 
scope of the subject, the scientitic audience and the high char- 
acter of the papers usually presented to you made me reluctaut 
to appear with the hope of presenting anything new or of pre- 
senting what is already familiar to you in a new and interesting 
form. I rely entirely on that generous courtesy which my 
friend Mr. Williams in a previous paper has described as the 
characteristic of the highly intellectual. 
While the title of this paper is Chemistry Applied to Industry, 
you will find that the illustrations are drawn principally from 
the iron industry. This is done not only because in all its branch- 
es it is perhaps the largest in point of tonnage and invested 
capital of any industry, with the exception of agriculture, but 
mainly because it is the one I am most familiar with; and our 
teachers of composition used to tell us that we could only write 
a lucid explanation of any subject when we first had a clear con- 
ception of it in our own minds. 
Chemistry is the youngest of the great divisions of science. 
The alchemists, working under the stimulus of being able to 
transform ordinary metals like lead into gold, though they did 
not succeed in accomplishing that which they undertook, they 
collected a great number of unoryvanized chemical facts and 
laid the foundation of what has since become the science of 
chemistry. The science of chemistry may properly be said to 
