Apbil 26, 1907] 



SCIENCE 



649 



dollars, or one half of one per cent, of his 

 contribution to the community in a single 

 year. And this is characteristic generally 

 of the rewards which come to chemists. 

 They are not taken from the common fund, 

 no man is poorer for them, their recipient 

 has made others richer in those rare cases 

 in which he has become rich himself. 



In the last century the United States has 

 grown from a narrow fringe of feeble states 

 along the Atlantic coast line to an im- 

 perial domain which spans the continent, 

 and yet for the purposes of business and 

 administration it is a smaller and more 

 compact community than it was a hundred 

 years ago. One reason for this anomaly 

 is found in the development of our great 

 transportation systems and as to these it 

 may be said that every signal lamp burns 

 more brightly, every pound of freight is 

 hauled more cheaply, and every traveler 

 carried with greater safety because of the 

 work of chemists and preeminently the 

 work of Dr. Dudley and his confreres in 

 standardizing and holding to the standard 

 the materials entering into railroad equip- 

 ment of every kind. 



All the activities of the community are 

 based in the last analysis on those which 

 have to do with agriculture and as to those 

 in the United States Secretary Wilson has 

 said "Every sunset during the past five 

 years has registered an increase of $3,- 

 400,000, in the value of the farms of this 

 country," which farms have produced in a 

 single year wealth aggregating six and 

 one half biUion dollars. Chemists from 

 Liebig down have done much to contribute 

 to these amazing totals by their analyses of 

 soils and of plant products, the adaptation 

 of fertilizers to soil requirements and the 

 needs of special crops; the utilization of 

 what were once waste products like com 

 oil, cotton oil, the gluten from starch 

 factories, casein from skim milk, cream of 

 tartar from the lees of wine and so on 



through an almost endless catalogue, and 

 yet great as are the figures given as the 

 output of American agriculture there can 

 be no doubt that they might be doubled 

 by the general application of the best 

 teachings of agricultural chemistry and 

 science. So much agriculture already 

 owes to chemistry while for the immediate 

 future is the promise of the commercial 

 fixation of atmospheric nitrogen with all 

 that that implies in increased productive 

 power of the soil. 



The relations of modern life, the inter- 

 dependence of communities far distant 

 from each other and the adjustments and 

 readjustments which are constantly made 

 necessary in these relations, has brought it 

 about that chemistry has not always bene- 

 fited agriculture but has on the contrary in 

 some signal instances been disastrous to 

 special though important agricultural in- 

 terests. The synthesis of alizarine from 

 anthracene in 1868 by Grabe and Lieber- 

 man and their later commercial prepara- 

 tion of the coloring matter from anthra- 

 quinone proved for example a death blow 

 to the cultivation of madder of which forty 

 years ago the annual production was about 

 500,000 tons, substantially all of which, as 

 the Avignon peasants sorrowfully say, is 

 now ' made by machinery. ' Similarly, 

 Baeyer's synthesis of indigo upset the 

 social economy of great regions in India 

 where his name was never heard and to- 

 day at leEist one half of the entire con- 

 sumption of this dye stufi: is produced in 

 German chemical plants. The manufac- 

 ture of these coloring matters is among the 

 great triumphs of organic chemistry, but 

 the inorganic chemist can point with equal 

 pride to the production of ultramarine 

 now sold for half the price of copper, 

 whereas in the form of lapis lazuli it was 

 in the time of Liebig a dearer thing than 

 gold. 



Chemists here and abroad have hardly 



