CHEMISTRY IN THE UNITED STATES. 
199 
tain chemical laboratories in connection with their works, 
and this is especially true with regard to metallurgical estab¬ 
lishments, oil refineries, soap, candle, and glass works, in the 
making of paints, varnishes, and chemicals, and so on in 
many directions. Even the great firms whose industries are 
connected with the Chicago stock-yards, with their artificial 
refrigeration and their manufacture of lard, lard and butter 
substitutes, meat extracts, pepsin, and fertilizers, all employ 
skilled chemists and provide well-equipped laboratories. In 
the making of steel and iron the processes are followed by 
analyses from start to finish, from ore, fuel, and flux to the 
completed billets; and the chemists who are thus occupied 
have gained marvelous dexterity. The analytical methods 
have been reduced to great precision, and are extraordinary 
as regards speed, work which once required a day to perform 
being now executed in less than twenty minutes. Exact 
measurement has replaced rule of thumb, certainty has sup¬ 
planted probability, industry has become less wasteful and 
surer of a fair return, and to all this the chemist has been a 
chief contributor. Without his aid the manufactures of the 
world could never have been developed to their present mag¬ 
nitude and efficiency. His influence reaches even beyond 
the furnace or the factory and touches the greatest economic 
questions. Take, for example, the financial agitation through 
which our country has so recently passed, with its discussion 
of monetary ratios. Chemical processes have profoundly 
modified the metallurgy of gold and silver, cheapening the 
production of both metals and changing the commercial 
ratio of their values. Can the bimetallic question be intelli¬ 
gently investigated with the chemical factor left out ? Fur¬ 
thermore, chemistry has created new industries in which both 
gold and silver are employed, and so, affecting both supply 
and demand, touches their ratios still more deeply. When 
politics becomes true to its definition, when it is really “ the 
science and art of government,” then we may expect politi¬ 
cians to consider questions like these and to study the evi¬ 
dence which chemistry has to offer. 
28-Bull. Phil. Soc., Wash., Vol. 13. 
