November 26, 1915] 



SCIENCE 



741 



It probably has not occurred to the lay- 

 man that the chemist might appear also 

 in the role of a land reclaimer, and yet the 

 discovery of commercially profitable meth- 

 ods of manufacturing alizarin and indigo 

 from coal tar has set free for other crops 

 hundreds of thousands of acres formerly 

 devoted to the raising of madder and 

 indigo. 



In the realm of animal industry, the 

 chemist has elucidated the laws of animal 

 nutrition and taught the farmer how to 

 adapt his feeding-stuffs to the needs of his 

 stock, so as to secure the maximum return 

 in work, meajt, fat or milk, and by analyt- 

 ical control again protects him from fraud 

 when he buys his cattle feed. When dis- 

 eases attack the herd, chemistry supplies 

 antiseptics and powerful remedies of all 

 kinds. Not so many years back, it was the 

 custom to build slaughter houses on the 

 banks of streams into which all the refuse 

 was turned. But chemistry has revolution- 

 ized all this, and the old joke about the 

 Chicago packing-houses using every part of 

 the pig, including the squeal, is now not far 

 from the truth. In modern abattoirs and 

 packing-houses, the hides are used for 

 leather; the grease is converted into soap, 

 candles, oleo and glycerol (for nitroglycerin 

 manufacture) ; the blood and scrap into 

 blood albumen, fertilizers and potassium 

 icyanide (for gold extraction, among other 

 uses) ; the horns and hoofs into jelly, but- 

 tons, knife handles, etc. ; the feet, bones and 

 heads, into glue, bone oil and bone-black. 

 The skim-milk formerly wasted, now sur- 

 renders its casein, from which so many in- 

 teresting and useful articles are manufac- 

 tured. Chemistry has also provided a num- 

 ber of satisfactory leather substitutes, while 

 the waste from real leather is converted into 

 fertilizer or glue. 



It is chemistry again which has put into 

 the hands of the builder non-combustible 



building materials, such as iron and steel, 

 cement, brick, plaster, terra-cotta, tiles of 

 all kinds, porcelain, pottery, stoneware and 

 earthenware, and all kinds of metallic fur- 

 nishings and fittings ; fireproofing solutions 

 for the safeguarding of combustible mate- 

 rials ; paints and varnishes, to protect from 

 weathering and decay; preservatives to 

 prolong the life of the timber and ward it 

 from the attacks of marine borers, molds 

 and fungi. 



Formerly all the alkali required for soap 

 manufacture was derived from wood ashes ; 

 but the chemist has shown how it can be 

 secured miich more economically by the 

 electrolysis of common salt. 



In addition to all this, and much more 

 which could be cited, it is chemistry that 

 provides a majority of our most potent 

 anesthetics, antiseptics and remedies of 

 various kinds. In his fight with disease and 

 death, the physician has no more powerful 

 or resourceful ally than the chemist. 

 Finally, the processes of the living organism, 

 plant or animal, are primarily chemical, 

 and instead of the formation of organic 

 compounds in the living organism being 

 longer referred to a mysterious "vis 

 vitalis, ' ' the question has lately been raised 

 seriously as to whether life itself is not 

 merely one of the products, or the resultant, 

 of a definite series of chemical reactions. 

 Dr. Sehaefer, in his presidential address 

 before the Dundee meeting of the British 

 Association for the Advancement of Sci- 

 ence, after calling attention to the compara- 

 tively few elements and simple compounds 

 of which living matter is composed, said 

 "The combination of these elements into a 

 colloidal compound represents the chemical 

 basis of life ; and when the chemist succeeds 

 in building up this compound, it will with- 

 out doubt be found to exhibit the phe- 

 nomena which we are in the habit of asso- 

 ciating with the term 'life' "; and he fur- 



