14 BULLETIN 102, PART 1 , UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM. 
vance toward a riper consciousness of national responsibilities in that 
conservation which, looking toward adequacy of employment rather 
than improvidence on the one hand or static hoarding on the other, 
seeks consistently to bring about the employment of the various 
means toward that end as they emerge from the channels of research. 
Vaguely an awakening consciousness in public opinion is coming 
to a discerning conception of some such national economics, but as in 
the conspicuous instance of the nitrogen situation, the response thus 
far has been spasmodic, uncomprehending, and expressed through 
media inadequately developed. 
With the resources of a country constituting the opportunity open- 
ing to its people, it follows that enhancement in the value of a 
natural resource is bound to represent not merely increased dividends 
for a favored few, but, in the last analysis, an actual corresponding 
increment to genuine unrestricted opportunity. In this connection, 
with coal the country’s greatest material heritage, the growth in its 
potentiality as yet ignored, furnishes a most impressive object lesson 
in resource administration. Twenty-five years ago the practicable 
potentiality recognized for the use of bituminous coal was approxi- 
mately : 
Coal 
Carbonized fuel Waste gas. 
Plate 10 gives the current expression of precisely the same situ- 
ation. The two speak for themselves, offering a contrast of growth 
which challenges duplication elsewhere in the whole progress of 
civilization for a like period of time. Important enough in its 
specific fact of application to the country’s dominant material re- 
source, the full significance of the contrast opens out in proportion 
as it is seen to apply throughout the whole range of chemically con- 
ducted industries, whereby the raw resources of a country are being 
consumed in the saving or wasting of the multitudinous products 
essential to the ever-widening requirements of independent national 
existence. 
There is a popular form of misconception which holds the impres- 
sion that the source of a given commodity is immaterial so long as 
the needs with reference to that particular article by itself are met 
advantageously. Fifty years ago such an impression represented a 
reasonably accurate interpretation of existing conditions, but of re- 
cent years a totally different situation has been developing. The 
change has been brought about through the constantly widening 
circle of acquaintanceship being made by chemistry amongst the in- 
gredients entering into material compositions, and has manifested 
