from
exhaustion of Germany's supplies of nitrate explosives, if not indeed
from exhaustion of her food supplies as a consequence of the lack of
nitrate and ammonia fertilizer for her fields. Inventions of substitutes
for cotton, copper, rubber, wool and many other basic needs have been
reported.

These feats of chemistry, performed under the stress of dire necessity,
have, no doubt, excited the wonder and interest of our public. It is far
more important at this time, however, when both for war and for peace
needs, the resources of our country are strained to the utmost, that the
public should awaken to a clear realization of what this science of
chemistry really means for mankind, to the realization that its wizardry
permeates the whole life of the nation as a vitalizing, protective and
constructive agent very much in the same way as our blood, coursing
through our veins and arteries, carries the constructive, defensive and
life-bringing materials to every organ in the body.

If the layman will but understand that chemistry is the fundamental
_science of the transformation of matter_, he will readily accept the
validity of this sweeping assertion: he will realize, for instance, why
exactly the same fundamental laws of the science apply to, and make
possible scientific control of, such widely divergent national
industries as agriculture and steel manufacturing. It governs the
transformation of the salts, minerals and humus of our fields and the
components of the air into corn, wheat, cotton and the innumerable other
products of the soil; it governs no less the transformation of crude
ores into steel and alloys, which, with the cunning born of chemical
knowledge, may be given practically any conceivable quality of hardness,
elasticity, toughness or strength. And exactly the same thing may be
said of the hundreds of national activities that lie between the two
extremes of agriculture and steel manufacture!

Moreover, the domain of the science of the transformation of matter
includes even life itself as its loftiest phase: from our birth to our
return to dust the laws of chemistry are the controlling laws of life,
health, disease and death, and the ever clearer recognition of this
relation is the strongest force that is raising medicine from the
uncertain realm of an art to the safer sphere of an exact science. To
many scientific minds it has even become evident that those most
wonderful facts of life, heredity and chara