the sulfuric acid process as No. 1936
on June 25, 1869. Perkin filed his for the same process as No. 1948 on
June 26. It had required twenty years to determine the constitution of
alizarin, but within six months from its first synthesis the commercial
process was developed and within a few years the sale of artificial
alizarin reached $8,000,000 annually. The madder fields of France were
put to other uses and even the French soldiers became dependent on
made-in-Germany dyes for their red trousers. The British soldiers were
placed in a similar situation as regards their red coats when after
1878 the azo scarlets put the cochineal bug out of business.

The modern chemist has robbed royalty of its most distinctive insignia,
Tyrian purple. In ancient times to be "porphyrogene," that is "born to
the purple," was like admission to the Almanach de Gotha at the present
time, for only princes or their wealthy rivals could afford to pay $600
a pound for crimsoned linen. The precious dye is secreted by a
snail-like shellfish of the eastern coast of the Mediterranean. From a
tiny sac behind the head a drop of thick whitish liquid, smelling like
garlic, can be extracted. If this is spread upon cloth of any kind and
exposed to air and sunlight it turns first green, next blue and then
purple. If the cloth is washed with soap--that is, set by alkali--it
becomes a fast crimson, such as Catholic cardinals still wear as princes
of the church. The Phoenician merchants made fortunes out of their
monopoly, but after the fall of Tyre it became one of "the lost
arts"--and accordingly considered by those whose faces are set toward
the past as much more wonderful than any of the new arts. But in 1909
Friedlander put an end to the superstition by analyzing Tyrian purple
and finding that it was already known. It was the same as a dye that had
been prepared five years before by Sachs but had not come into
commercial use because of its inferiority to others in the market. It
required 12,000 of the mollusks to supply the little material needed for
analysis, but once the chemist had identified it he did not need to
bother the Murex further, for he could make it by the ton if he had
wanted to. The coloring principle turned out to be a di-brom indigo,
that is the same as the substance extracted from the Indian plant, but
with the addition of two atoms of bromine. Why a particular kind of a
shellfish should have got the habit of extracting this rare eleme