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roducing methyl groups, until he gets it just to his liking. Art can go ahead of nature in the dyestuff business. Before man found that he could make all the dyes he wanted from the tar he had been burning up at home he searched the wide world over to find colors by which he could make himself--or his wife--garments as beautiful as those that arrayed the flower, the bird and the butterfly. He sent divers down into the Mediterranean to rob the murex of his purple. He sent ships to the new world to get Brazil wood and to the oldest world for indigo. He robbed the lady cochineal of her scarlet coat. Why these peculiar substances were formed only by these particular plants, mussels and insects it is hard to understand. I don't know that Mrs. Cacti Coccus derived any benefit from her scarlet uniform when khaki would be safer, and I can't imagine that to a shellfish it was of advantage to turn red as it rots or to an indigo plant that its leaves in decomposing should turn blue. But anyhow, it was man that took advantage of them until he learned how to make his own dyestuffs. Our independent ancestors got along so far as possible with what grew in the neighborhood. Sweetapple bark gave a fine saffron yellow. Ribbons were given the hue of the rose by poke berry juice. The Confederates in their butternut-colored uniform were almost as invisible as if in khaki or _feldgrau_. Madder was cultivated in the kitchen garden. Only logwood from Jamaica and indigo from India had to be imported. That we are not so independent today is our own fault, for we waste enough coal tar to supply ourselves and other countries with all the new dyes needed. It is essentially a question of economy and organization. We have forgotten how to economize, but we have learned how to organize. The British Government gave the discoverer of mauve a title, but it did not give him any support in his endeavors to develop the industry, although England led the world in textiles and needed more dyes than any other country. So in 1874 Sir William Perkin relinquished the attempt to manufacture the dyes he had discovered because, as he said, Oxford and Cambridge refused to educate chemists or to carry on research. Their students, trained in the classics for the profession of being a gentleman, showed a decided repugnance to the laboratory on account of its bad smells. So when Hofmann went home he virtually took the infant industry along with him to Germany, where
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