THE IMPERIAL ASPECTS OF CHEMICAL SCIENCE. 
Estimates, which certainly lean towards the conservative side, of 
the requirements of combined nitrogen for various purposes in the 
United Kingdom are given in the recently published report of the 
Nitrogen Products Committee, a document worthy of serious study by 
every one interested in the future of our Empire. Immediately prior 
to the war, agriculture in the United Kingdom absorbed an annual 
average of 25,000 tons of nitrogen in the form of artificial fertilizers; 
the present demand of agriculture in the United Kingdom is estimated 
as 60,000 tons per annum, and the possible demand in the near future 
as 100,000 tons per annum of combined nitrogen. Small deficits in the 
supply of the difference between 25,000 and 100,000 tons per annum 
of combined nitrogen will be met at the cost of our manufacturing and 
export trades; a large deficit will be met by starvation. The only 
method of averting a species of nitrogen bankruptey of the Empire lies 
in the installation on a huge scale of the several types of process for 
utilizing atmospheric nitrogen. 
Equally important from the Imperial point of view is the organized 
large-scale exploitation of the limitless resources of our Golonies in the 
shape of raw materials for the manufacture of edible fats and oils. 
The fatty materials which we consume are utilized in the animal 
economy mainly for the provision of the energy which we throw out 
as heat and in muscular effort. It is curious to reflect that the actual 
material consumed acts merely as a store of the energy which it brings 
with it in the form available for animal use, and that the margarine 
produced by chemical methods from palm kernel or cocoanut oil,- which 
we eat, merely serves as a carrier to our bodies of heat energy projected 
from the sun into one or other of our tropical colonies. Great as has 
been the development of those scientific industries which involve the 
conversion of vegetable oils into common foods by chemical methods 
during the last five years, much still remains to be done to utilize 
these tropical products. 
We may now pass from this brief and inadequate discussion of. the 
great Imperial aspects of chemistry which concern the maintenance of 
connexion between body and soul to the consideration of several other 
large chemical problems which our Empire has to solve. 
It is well known that the industry concerned with the manufacture 
of the so-called coal-tar colours was founded upon the purely scientific 
chemical work of the late Sir William Perkin, and that the indusiry, 
started in the United Kingdom, soon languished with us and became 
one of the great and most profitable of German manufactures. Pre- 
vious to the war we imported some £2,000,000 worth per annum of these 
dyestuffs from Germany, and the stoppage of this importation paralyzed 
our textile industries, which represents financial interests a hundred 
times as great. The early coal-tar dyes were brilliant but-evanescent, 
and in point of fastness against light and washing fell far behind the 
few natural dyestuffs formerly in use; in this they probably but fol- 
lowed the fashion, for the demand came for light fabrics of gaudy 
colours capable of withstanding much less rough usage than the more 
substantial heavy cloths which our forefathers affected. The progress 
‘of chemical science led, however, to the discovery of more stable coal- 
tar dyes, and at the present time a variety of such substances extra- 
ordinarily resistant to change is available;-some of ‘the artificial 
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