SCIENCE AND INDUSTRY. 
smoke abatement, and any other subject directly ‘bearing on the fuel 
problem as affecting industrial consumers. There is already plenty of 
evidence of the importance which British manufacturers attach to the 
question of Fuel Economy, and there is little doubt that the new |. 
department of the F.B.I, will quickly receive many applications for 
assistance. i 
WHERE THE GERMANS GOT GLYCERINE. 
Where the Germans got the glycerine for the manufacture of high 
explosives was one of the mysteries of the last two years of the war. 
It was a puzzle, not merely to the British Government, one of whose 
members made the belated announcement that glycerine could be de- 
rived from lard, but to English chemists who were aware that fats, 
_of which lard was one, were the sole substances from which glycerine 
hitherto had been derived. We had closed down by the blockade the 
entrance to Germany of fats from the outside, and during 1917 and 
1918 it did not seem possible that she could have fats enough to keep 
her population alive and furnish the glycerine for explosives as well. 
Somehow, she was managing. Yet, theoretically, she ought not to have 
been able to do so, and a circumstance which supported the theory, 
though it was contradicted by the facts, was that she appeared to have 
no soap. Soap is also made out of fats. In short, she evidently was 
short of fats; yet she had the glycerine. 
The contradiction could only be reconciled on the supposition that she 
was getting glycerine out of something other than fat. That is exactly 
what she was doing, and the story of how she did it is one of the 
curiosities of research. The story begins with Pasteur. Many years 
ugo the great Frenchman’s work explored the splitting up of the cells 
ot substances by enzymes, or, to use a simpler word for the purpose 
ot this argument, the power of yeasts. By yeasts, the cells of sugar 
van be split up into alcohol and carbonic acid gas. All these are simple 
substances, yet nothing except these powerful yeast enzymes will do the 
vonjuring trick. Long after Pasteur’s classic researches, both while he: 
was living and after he was dead, chemists sought to ‘find the key of 
mechanism whereby this wonderful transformation is effected. In con- 
nexion with the transformation there are two side products. Besides 
the alcohol and the carbonic acid into which the sugar is split, there 
was always a small quantity of acetic aldehyde, and, ‘still more myster- 
ious, a minute quantity of glycerine. The quantity of glycerine was 
proportionately very small. 
““A PURELY ACADEMIC’ PROBLEM.” 
The aldehydes are the substances which lend flavour to the various 
forms of drinkable alcohol; so that from an industrial point of view 
there might have been, though there was not, some profit in following 
them up. But that was not the research chemist’s incentive. He con- 
tinued to investigate the acetie aldehyde, which might be expected to 
vary according to the amount of oxidation which the aleohol underwent ; 
and also to probe that surprising appearance of glycerine, because these 
phenomena might afford some explanation of the way the transforma- 
tion was worked. It was, you might say, a purely academic problem, 
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