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mount at least, than that of the so-called higher senses. We eat three times a day; some of us drink oftener; few of us visit the concert hall or the art gallery as often as we do the dining room. Then, too, these primitive senses have a stronger influence upon our emotional nature than those acquired later in the course of evolution. As Kipling puts it: Smells are surer than sounds or sights To make your heart-strings crack. VI CELLULOSE Organic compounds, on which our life and living depend, consist chiefly of four elements: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen. These compounds are sometimes hard to analyze, but when once the chemist has ascertained their constitution he can usually make them out of their elements--if he wants to. He will not want to do it as a business unless it pays and it will not pay unless the manufacturing process is cheaper than the natural process. This depends primarily upon the cost of the crude materials. What, then, is the market price of these four elements? Oxygen and nitrogen are free as air, and as we have seen in the second chapter, their direct combination by the electric spark is possible. Hydrogen is free in the form of water but expensive to extricate by means of the electric current. But we need more carbon than anything else and where shall we get that? Bits of crystallized carbon can be picked up in South Africa and elsewhere, but those who can afford to buy them prefer to wear them rather than use them in making synthetic food. Graphite is rare and hard to melt. We must then have recourse to the compounds of carbon. The simplest of these, carbon dioxide, exists in the air but only four parts in ten thousand by volume. To extract the carbon and get it into combination with the other elements would be a difficult and expensive process. Here, then, we must call in cheap labor, the cheapest of all laborers, the plants. Pine trees on the highlands and cotton plants on the lowlands keep their green traps set all the day long and with the captured carbon dioxide build up cellulose. If, then, man wants free carbon he can best get it by charring wood in a kiln or digging up that which has been charred in nature's kiln during the Carboniferous Era. But there is no reason why he should want to go back to elemental carbon when he can have it already combined with hydrogen in the remains of modern or fossil vegetation. The synthetic products on which modern chemistry
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