A  October,'  1915™'}  Contributions  to  Industrial  Chemistry.  469 
Dr.  H.  K.  Benson,  in  his  paper,  read  at  the  recent  Seattle  meet- 
ing of  the  American  Chemical  Society,  on  the  "  Resources  of  the 
Northwest,"  said  that  the  phosphate  deposits  of  Idaho  were  thirty 
times  greater  than  the  other  deposits  in  the  United  States.  The 
United  States  Geological  Survey  estimates  that  these  Idaho  de- 
posits contain  2500  million  tons  of  phosphate  rock  with  35  to  37  per 
cent.  P2Og. 
Related  to  this  phosphate  fertilizer  industry  is  our  utilization 
of  animal  scrap  and  waste  for  analogous  use  as  fertilizer  material. 
I  will  note  three  principal  sources  of  supply  of  this  material :  First  is 
the  tankage  and  scrap  of  the  great  packing-houses  at  Chicago,  Kan- 
sas City,  Omaha,  etc. ;  second,  the  menhaden  fish  residue  of  our 
Atlantic  coast,  after  the  oil  has  been  extracted ;  and,  third,  the  waste 
of  the  salmon  and  other  fish-canning  industries  on  the  Pacific  coast. 
With  regard  to  this  latter,  Dr.  H.  K.  Benson,  in  his  paper  on  the 
"  Resources  of  the  Northwest,"  stated  that  from  a  packing  of  eight 
million  cases  of  salmon  in  1913,  140,210  tons  of  cannery  waste  was 
obtained.  Of  the  amount  of  material  from  the  other  sources  named 
I  have  no  present  information. 
Another  great  industry,  while  not  created  de  novo,  has  been 
profoundly  modified  by  an  American  invention  which  was  developed 
and  in  use  here  for  years  before  it  was  taken  up  abroad.  I  refer 
to  the  water-gas  manufacture.  This  was  the  invention  of  Thad- 
deus  S.  C.  Lowe,  who  had  already  established  a  creditable  reputa- 
tion as  a  military  aeronaut  in  our  Civil  War.  The  Lowe  water-gas 
process  of  1872-5  afterwards  was  acquired  by  the  United  Gas  Im- 
provement Company  of  Philadelphia  and  underlies  the  present  large 
manufacture  of  this  type  of  gas,  whether  carburetted  or  otherwise, 
which  is  practised  in  this  country  and  in  Europe  upon  the  conti- 
nent. The  Germans  followed  in  1886,  and  with  an  improved  form 
of  apparatus  in  1895. 
More  recently  we  have  seen  another  old-established  chemical 
industry  revolutionized  by  an  American  invention,  which  had  the 
effect  of  establishing  what  might  be  called  a  new  and  highly  suc- 
cessful American  industry.  I  refer  to  the  American  production  of 
sulphur  in  Louisiana  by  the  aid  of  the  Frasch  process  of  extraction 
of  the  sulphur  in  melted  form  by  pumping  it  from  the  depths  where 
it  is  found.  This  American  production  of  a  nearly  pure  native  sul- 
phur has  completely  stopped  the  importation  of  Sicilian  sulphur,  and 
