there isn't more money in the sawdust
than in sashes, doors, and blinds which the factory turns out is because
we have more faith in cog-wheels than we have in test tubes.

In machinery, big or little, Americans stand at the head of the class; in
industrial chemistry they are at the foot of the class.

We pay the Germans about ten times what we ought to for phenacetin,
because we can't get it into our heads that there is any money in applied
organic chemistry. Coal-tar was once a nuisance, but the Germans make
indigo so much better and cheaper from it now that they have put the
indigo-plant out of business.

The red trousers of the French soldiers are dyed with German alizarin,
also a coal-tar product, because it doesn't pay to raise madder any
longer. In coal-tar are all sorts of valuable drugs, dyes, and perfumes.
But we don't know it--industrially.

Stay! I do my country an injustice. We can make moth-balls and carbolic
acid. But that is as much as ever we can do. And this is why we do not
utilize the saw-dust and make a better business out of it than the sawmill
can.

And garbage! I wonder how much orange-peel and lemon-peel is thrown away
in New York City every day, and how much the neroli or essential oil that
could be got from it would be worth. I wonder if the stalks and fag-ends
of vegetables could not be distilled and something made from them. But the
limit of our wisdom in regard to garbage is: burn it and get power from
it. Somebody is going to get rich from this garbage problem one of these
days. But it will be the test-tube and not the cogwheel that will make the
money. It will be the industrial chemist, not the mechanic.

Fortunes Lurk in Old Wool.

See what a difference such knowledge has made in the wool industry.
Sheep's wool is dirty and greasy when it comes to the mills. Wash it with
strong alkali in running water. That is what has always been done. But a
man in Massachusetts thought it would be a good idea to dissolve the
grease with some such solvent as naphtha. He saved the naphtha to use over
again; he recovered the grease, which is the most softening and
penetrating of all fats and is most valuable for ointments, and he
recovered carbonate of potash. Sheep wearing heavy wool in the hot weather
perspire freely, and this perspiration contains carbonate of potash.

After the wool is once woven into cloth, we may dismiss from our minds all
thought of effecting any more economies. When the