e the corn syrups consisting of
about 85 per cent. of glucose and 15 per cent. of sugar flavored with
maple or vanillin or whatever we like. It is encouraging to see the bill
boards proclaiming the virtues of "Karo" syrup and "Mazola" oil when
only a few years ago the products of our national cereal were without
honor in their own country.

Many other products besides foods are made from corn starch. Dextrin
serves in place of the old "gum arabic" for the mucilage of our
envelopes and stamps. Another form of dextrin sold as "Kordex" is used
to hold together the sand of the cores of castings. After the casting
has been made the scorched core can be shaken out. Glucose is used in
place of sugar as a filler for cheap soaps and for leather.

Altogether more than a hundred different commercial products are now
made from corn, not counting cob pipes. Every year the factories of the
United States work up over 50,000,000 bushels of corn into 800,000,000
pounds of corn syrup, 600,000,000 pounds of starch, 230,000,000 pounds
of corn sugar, 625,000,000 pounds of gluten feed, 90,000,000 pounds of
oil and 90,000,000 pounds of oil cake.

Two million bushels of cobs are wasted every year in the United States.
Can't something be made out of them? This is the question that is
agitating the chemists of the Carbohydrate Laboratory of the Department
of Agriculture at Washington. They have found it possible to work up the
corn cobs into glucose and xylose by heating with acid. But glucose can
be more cheaply obtained from other starchy or woody materials and they
cannot find a market for the xylose. This is a sort of a sugar but only
about half as sweet as that from cane. Who can invent a use for it! More
promising is the discovery by this laboratory that by digesting the cobs
with hot water there can be extracted about 30 per cent. of a gum
suitable for bill posting and labeling.

Since the starches and sugars belong to the same class of compounds as
the celluloses they also can be acted upon by nitric acid with the
production of explosives like guncotton. Nitro-sugar has not come into
common use, but nitro-starch is found to be one of safest of the high
explosives. On account of the danger of decomposition and spontaneous
explosion from the presence of foreign substances the materials in
explosives must be of the purest possible. It was formerly thought that
tapioca must be imported from Java for making nitro-starch. But during
the wa