as aconite, belladonna, henbane,
all of which can be freely grown--which even grow wild--in these
islands; even, incredible as it may seem, for foxglove leaves. These
things with many others were imported from Germany and Austria. Here
again leeway has had to be made up; but it ought never to have been
necessary, and now that the war is over steps should be taken to see
that it never need be necessary again. The encouragement of British
herb-gardens and of scientific experiment therein on the best method of
culture for the raw material of our organic medicines must certainly be
matters early taken in hand.

The classical example of the mortal injury done to British manufacture
by the British manufacturer's former contempt for the scientific man is
that of the aniline dyes, which are so closely associated with the
synthetic drugs as to form one subject of discussion. Quite early in the
war dye-stuffs ran short, and there was no means of replenishing the
stock in Britain, nor even in America, these products having formed the
staple of a colossal manufacture, with an enormous financial turnover,
in Germany.

Let us look at the history of these dyes. The first aniline dye was
discovered quite by accident, in 1856, by the late Professor W. H.
Perkin. He called it "mauve," from the French word for the mallow, the
colour of whose flower it somewhat resembled. In 1862 there was an
International Exhibition in London; and those who remembered it and its
predecessor of 1851 have declared that the case of aniline
dye-stuffs--for by that time quite a number of new pigments had been
discovered--excited at the later the same attention as that given to the
Koh-i-noor at the earlier. The invention, out of which grew the enormous
German business already alluded to, and with which has been associated
the discovery and manufacture of the synthetic drugs, was entirely
British in its inception and in its early stages. Moreover the raw
materials on which it depended, namely, gas-tar products, were to be had
in greater abundance in England than anywhere else. Yet, at the time
when the war broke out, this industry had been allowed almost entirely
to drift into German hands.

How was this? Let an expert reply. It was due, he tells us, to the
neglect of "the repeated warnings which have been issued since that
time" (_viz._ 1880, by which date the Germans had succeeded in capturing
the trade in question) "in no uncertain voice by Meldola, Green