e story of
scientific achievement is the greatest epic the world has ever known,
and like the great national epics of bygone ages, should quicken the
life of the nation by a realization of its powers and a picture of its
possibilities.

CREATIVE CHEMISTRY

La Chimie possede cette faculte creatrice a un degre plus
eminent que les autres sciences, parce qu'elle penetre plus
profondement et atteint jusqu'aux elements naturels des etres.

--_Berthelot_.

I

THREE PERIODS OF PROGRESS

The story of Robinson Crusoe is an allegory of human history. Man is a
castaway upon a desert planet, isolated from other inhabited worlds--if
there be any such--by millions of miles of untraversable space. He is
absolutely dependent upon his own exertions, for this world of his, as
Wells says, has no imports except meteorites and no exports of any kind.
Man has no wrecked ship from a former civilization to draw upon for
tools and weapons, but must utilize as best he may such raw materials as
he can find. In this conquest of nature by man there are three stages
distinguishable:

1. The Appropriative Period
2. The Adaptive Period
3. The Creative Period

These eras overlap, and the human race, or rather its vanguard,
civilized man, may be passing into the third stage in one field of human
endeavor while still lingering in the second or first in some other
respect. But in any particular line this sequence is followed. The
primitive man picks up whatever he can find available for his use. His
successor in the next stage of culture shapes and develops this crude
instrument until it becomes more suitable for his purpose. But in the
course of time man often finds that he can make something new which is
better than anything in nature or naturally produced. The savage
discovers. The barbarian improves. The civilized man invents. The first
finds. The second fashions. The third fabricates.

The primitive man was a troglodyte. He sought shelter in any cave or
crevice that he could find. Later he dug it out to make it more roomy
and piled up stones at the entrance to keep out the wild beasts. This
artificial barricade, this false facade, was gradually extended and
solidified until finally man could build a cave for himself anywhere in
the open field from stones he quarried out of the hill. But man was not
content with such materials and now puts up a building which may be
composed of steel, brick, terra