Januaet 8, 1909] 



SCIENCE 



75 



been during the last few years had not cement 

 come into such general use. The forester re- 

 plied in part as follows : " The Forest Service 

 is watching with a great deal of interest the 

 increasing use of cement and other substitutes 

 for wood. They are undoubtedly having some 

 influence on the price of lumber, though I do 

 not think that up to the present time they 

 have greatly retarded the advance in lumber 

 prices. The fact is that our industrial prog- 

 ress has been so great that our requirements 

 for every kind of structural material have in- 

 creased tremendously. We are using at the 

 present time more lumber per capita than ever 

 before and probably twice as much per capita 

 as we did fifty years ago. The conclusion can 

 not be escaped, therefore, that in the future 

 we must depend more than in the past on 

 other materials than wood for certain purposes 

 at least. As to the increase that will take 

 place in the production of cement, my impres- 

 sion is that this will be very great." If the 

 increase in the use of cement in the United 

 States in past years is to be regarded as any 

 index to its future use, the conclusions of the 

 forester are well founded. The statistics of 

 the production of minerals show that our out- 

 put of cement has more than doubled in the 

 last five years, and it is well known that its 

 use is being very widely extended. This is 

 due to two conditions : In the first place, excel- 

 lent cement materials are common in almost 

 all sections of the country; in the second 

 place, reinforced concrete for heavy building 

 material is receiving increased favor among 

 engineers, while in the country regions large 

 amounts of cement are being used for building 

 blocks for smaller structures. Reports received 

 by the survey during the six years from 1902 

 to 190Y show that the production of cement 

 in the United States has increased from 

 25,000,000 barrels, valued at approximately 

 $25,000,000, to 51,000,000 barrels, valued at 

 $55,000,000, the annual statistics showing a 

 steady increase in production with some slight 

 fluctuations in price. 



The western phosphate lands recently with- 

 drawn from entry by the Secretary of the 

 Interior in accordance with the President's 



order comprise portions of Morgan, Rich and 

 Cache counties in Utah; portions of Bear 

 Lake, Bannock, Bingham and Fremont coun- 

 ties in Idaho; and nearly all of Uinta County 

 in Wyoming — in all about 7,500 square miles 

 of land more or less underlain by phosphate 

 rock and constituting the greatest known phos- 

 phate deposit of the world. Phosphoric acid 

 is an essential constituent of productive soil. 

 Work at agricultural experiment stations in 

 Wisconsin, Ohio and Illinois has shown that 

 in fifty-four years the cultivated soils of those 

 states have been depleted of one third of their 

 original content of phosphoric acid, or at an 

 annual rate of about 20 pounds per acre. 

 Even if the loss has been only one half this, 

 amount it would require 6,000,000 tons of 

 phosphate rock annually to offset this deple- 

 tion in the 400,000,000 acres of cultivated 

 lands in the United States, without allowance 

 for increase in the area cultivated or in the 

 agricultural yield. The list of lands to be 

 withdrawn was furnished by the United States 

 Geological Survey as a result of preliminary 

 examinations made in the field. Further work 

 will be done by the survey as soon as practic- 

 able, for the purpose of making a careful 

 classification of the lands and restoring to 

 agricultural entry such portions as may con- 

 tain no phosphates. It is pointed out by the- 

 survey that the situation of this western field 

 is most favorable. The smelters at Butte and 

 Anaconda give off gases, chiefly sulphurous, 

 which are very injurious to vegetation. These 

 gases can be utilized to great advantage by 

 converting them into sulphuric acid for the 

 manufacture of superphosphate fertilizer, thus 

 transforming a substance that is injurious to- 

 vegetation into one that is beneficial. 



A LETTER to Nature signed " T " reads as 

 follows : 



The council of the Chemical Society, at a recent 

 meeting when it was determined to exclude women 

 from the fellowship, but to admit them to the 

 society as " subscribers," decided, " after mature 

 deliberation " — ^the phrase is the senior secretary's 

 — that the appellation " subscriber " should be 

 printed with a big S! 

 Daughters of Eve! So zealous to pursue 

 The work in Life by which you seek to live! 



