232  Conservation  and  Chemical  Engineer.  {  Am'M^0yuri9i?arm' 
CONSERVATION  AND  THE  CHEMICAL  ENGINEER.* 
By  Samuel  P.  Sadtler. 
We  have  heard  much  in  the  last  year  or  two  concerning  the 
conservation  of  our  natural  resources  and  we  shall,  I  feel  certain, 
hear  much  more  in  the  next  few  years,  as  the  facts  elicited  from  the 
preliminary  studies  of  the  subject  come  to  be  understood  by  the 
public  at  large.  The  importance  of  the  subject  will  grow  corre- 
spondingly as  the  matter  is  studied  by  the  thoughtful  citizen,  and  his 
appreciation  of  it  will  in  time  be  reflected  in  the  activity  of  the 
statesmen  at  Washington  in  the  proposing  of  remedial  measures. 
Conservation  let  us  note,  however,  represents  the  third  stage 
in  the  history  of  the  development  of  natural  resources. 
The  first  stage  is  exploration  or  discovery.  This  is  the  era  of 
the  prospector  and  has  given  us  in  this  country  some  famous  epi- 
sodes. We  need  only  recall  the  discovery  of  gold  in  California  in 
1849  and  the  way  in  which  it  operated  to  attract  adventurous  spirits 
from  the  older  parts  of  our  country,  or  the  repetition  of  the  same 
story  with  the  discovery  of  the  rich  gold  deposits  on  the  Yukon  and 
at  Nome  in  Alaska. 
The  first  discovery  of  rich  petroleum  deposits  of  Western  Penn- 
sylvania in  the  early  sixties  broug-ht,  similarly,  multitudes  of  pros- 
pectors or  "  wildcatters,"  as  they  came  to  be  known  locally,  and  this 
experience  has  been  repeated  also  from  time  to  time  as  great  petro- 
leum gushers  or  powerful  gas  wells  have  been  reported  in  various 
sections  of  the  country,  resulting  in  the  opening  of  new  fields,  as  in 
Ohio,  Indiana,  Kansas,  Texas,  and  Oklahoma. 
The  second  stage  is  exploitation,  when  these  lavish  gifts  of 
nature  are  worked  with  a  view  mainly  of  increasing  production  and 
usually  in  a  wasteful  way  with  no  thought  of  the  exhaustion  of  the 
supply. 
As  illustrations  of  this  stage  we  need  only  cite  the  way  in  which 
our  coal  mines  have  been  worked.  In  Bulletin  394  of  the  U.  S. 
Geological  Survey  (papers  on  the  conservation  of  mineral  resources) 
we  find  the  statement  that  "  it  has  been  estimated  that  the  actual 
*  Presidential  address  delivered  at  the  second  annual  meeting  of  the 
American  Institute  of  Chemical  Engineers  in  Philadelphia,  Dec.  8,  1909 ;  and 
reprinted  from  Metallurgical  and  Chemical  Engineering,  8,  p.  9,  Jan.,  1910. 
