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as their enemies make out, but they are continually telling governments what they must do if they want affairs to go well, and the governments listen. They must listen, for the big business men can withhold loans, paralyze railways, engineer press campaigns. Moreover, they have great power for good; thanks to their international connections, they often take a view wider than that of the average politician become a prime minister. It is rather a special view, for they tend to consider that if abundant goods are being made, carried on ships, and sold in shops, all is well with the world. But that is a semi-correct view. In general, if a country is prosperous, it looks after its education and its intellectual development. The scientific man hardly ever has a world view. He seems to know only his laboratories and those of the people who labor in his own field. His appearances in politics are generally inept; he has no sympathy with whist, the garden, and the dog.

That is why the business man must beat him. The business man is intellectually inferior, but the scientific man is often so caked with knowledge that he cannot move; that, through the thick crust, he cannot perceive the common men and their desires.

The engineer type may introduce a variation; intellectually sound, and practically capable, he may by degrees design a world where there is less grab than in the business man's paradise. He has a tradition of effective action, as against the business man's tradition of profitable action. He raises against himself less merriment than the scientific man, and less hatred than the business man. His only weakness is that he concentrates upon the joy of doing things. He is probably much more excited over building a bridge than is the business man over settling the tolls. His toy is material, not mental, but it is a toy. He grows inflamed, and devotes himself to toys, while the business man watches him, to take him up, to make him work for profit. If he develops general ideas,

VOL. CXLIV.-No. 863.-84

the engineer may by degrees outline some scheme for the organization of a pacific and happy world, but I suspect that the business man will get there first.

It is probable that, as time goes on, the scientific man will become more commercial, the business man much more scientific. Since neither can do without the other, since they must use each other, they may go on struggling for power and in the end become merged. But one doubts whether a combined mind can produce the future leaders. I suspect that the leaders of the future will be recruited from among the business men much more than from among the men of science. Their commonness will give them their power, because commonness is not a low quality; it is not unkind— it is animal, earthy, everyday. It is the stuff of life. The business man has been violently attacked under the name of trust magnate, and people have been unjust. The trusts were not constituted as public-utility societies. They were out for money at any price, but the fact remains that they cheapened production, brought into the home of the poor man comforts that King Croesus never knew. They have organized industry, regulated it. It may be that their service is finished, but a service it is. The minds that did these things are no smaller than they were. They are still capable of broad views, of international organization. I do not believe in inspired millionaires, but it may be that the logic of facts, of common sense, the need for peace that big commercial machines must enjoy, may lead us farther toward stability than the advice of all the lawyers and the cold imaginations of science. I have no great faith in the man of science. He is as brilliant as a diamond, and as small. I believe that the next century or so will lay its burden upon the back of the man of business. It is he must organize international harmony. It is he will have to lead, whether he likes it or not, and he will retain his leadership only if he learns to lead well.

THI

BEYOND THE LABORATORY

BY ELLWOOD HENDRICK

HIS has to do with chemistry, if you please, but not with the chemistry that we study and talk about and practice. Our principal faculty for recognizing distinctions in this field is the olfactory sense, but we are ignorant of it, and we do not cultivate it. Therefore this superlaboratory chemistry is not a science; it is hardly a trade. We merely have a few tricks, and chemical practice in relation to it might well be called the rule of thumb, were it not for the fact that convention has established associations of humor and disdain in the joining of thumbs to noses.

There is no balance, no reagent, no indicator, that will reveal the presence or absence of many of the will-o'-thewisp bodies which our noses discover. And yet, instead of dwelling in the academic halls of pure science, these same bodies are established in industry, and they make or ruin corporations.

Let us cite a few examples. For many years certain perfumers of Cologne have been making so-called Cologne water, and they built up an important business before the war. With German ports closed, other perfumers made eau de Cologne, but not one of them made the real thing. One of the German concerns started an American branch factory, but the product resembles the original only in the shape of the container and in the label; otherwise it is no better than any one of a dozen defective imitations of the original. Another concern found a member of a family famous for making it who lived in France and was a French citizen. So the advertisements were resplendent with the announcement that this great manufacturer was not a German at all, but a Frenchman, and that he would continue to make his product,

just the same as before, but in Paris. It is, however, not the same; the only resemblance is in the name. It is no better than the American imitations. It is said that the makers of German eau de Cologne had insisted on using a specially made spirit from beet sugar. It may hardly seem economical to make ethyl alcohol, popularly known as grain alcohol, from beet sugar when out of cheaper materials we can make it and rectify it and purify it until it becomes Cologne spirit, as we call it. Of course ethyl alcohol is ethyl alcohol; we know that, whether we produce it from molasses or sugar or sawdust, or whatever we will. It is the same with the exception of one divided by what, so far as our means of detection go, is infinity, which makes it a difference of zero or no difference at all, according to laboratory practice. But there is a difference in the finished product, and we guess that it may be due to the source of the sugar.

Time was, when we lived in iniquity and sin, that there were constant and generous offerings made of rye and bourbon whiskies; and to the depraved taste of many of us these beverages had merit. They were made of barley malt and rye or corn for the spirit, and prune juice or other ingredients, designed to appeal to what we call the palate, but which is in fact the nose. Many so called blends were made of alcohol distilled from corn and other familiar ingredients which to many persons "tasted right.” But those now addicted to the visit of secret places declare that the substituted "hooch" made of molasses alcohol and the same other ingredients is vastly different. To the chemical eye molasses alcohol is the same as that distilled from a mash of corn, but even to the un

cultured nose the final products made with it are different. In this respect the nose is more discriminating than the eye. A gentleman interested in agricultural products wanted to make cheese of the type of Camembert, but while he had the same ferment, employed the same methods, and used what seemed to be the same kind of milk, neither he nor anyone else in this country obtained the same results. On visiting France he found that the makers of the cheese in question were very particular about their milk, obtaining it from the dairymen of a certain district only. In the fields of these farmers there grew, he found, a sprinkling of certain grasses that he did not find elsewhere, and it is possible, and even likely, that these make the subtle difference in the milk that shows in the cheese which distinguishes the genuine from the artificial product. And yet, the special grasses were only incidental; they were not the main grasses of the pastures, which were the same as those found elsewhere.

We have been rather insistent that physicians should study chemistry, but the reactions with which they have to do are baffling. Many are within this domain of superlaboratory chemistry, and I doubt if we chemists have helped them as much as we thought we should, say, forty years ago. It would be interesting to know whether the same drugs synthesized from different materials are really the same in their effects. Some physicians doubt and feel nervous over it, and some do not, but nobody can tell them. And the doubters are not all nervous old women, either. We might be nervous ourselves if we were sick. The therapeutic action of some drugs may be due to the presence of unrecognized bodies in association with them. Whether their presence could be determined by an olfactometer or not is still a question. They might be. Or some of them might be.

The physical chemist has engaged so much in high attenuations that the rest of us have sometimes grown restless,

and have asked him to come down to the earth and deal with practical quantities and concentrations. But I think the question fair whether the rest of us should not also reach up toward the sky, and consider more definitely and more thoroughly the high attenuations. According to Irving Langmuir, if we were to change the atoms of a cubic foot of air into grains of sand that would pass through a sieve of one hundred mesh to the inch, the air being at ordinary temperature and pressure, we should have sand enough and to spare to fill a trench three feet deep and a mile wide from New York to San Francisco. This may be more concretely expressed by ten to a given power. It is not difficult to deal with the quantity mathematically. Then would it not be fair to compute how many molecules of musk in the same quantity, or, rather, in a liter of air, a good observer may recognize through his nose in a Zwaardemaker olfactometer? The task is not difficult, and soon we might make tables of the olfactory power of bodies. Nobody knows as well as the chemist how useful such compendia are.

Sometimes a little light is shed as we glance through chemical literature, but the study of odors is usually made secondary to some other purpose. Thus, in the July, 1920, number of the Journal of the American Chemical Society, there was a record by Messrs. Power and Chestnutt of the Bureau of Chemistry of the United States Department of Agriculture, of their studies of the odorous constituents of apples. They looked for amyl valerate, which is known in the perfumery and flavoring-extract trade as "apple oil" because it has a marked apple odor. But they found no traces of it. The odorous constituents they found to consist essentially in amyl esters of formic, acetic, and caproic acids, with a smaller amount of the caprylic ester, and a considerable proportion of acetaldehyde. These occur in mixtures of varying proportions, the variety of proportion giving rise to the variety of

odors. The quantities of the oil, or mixture of the bodies mentioned, were found to be 70 hundred-thousandths of 1 per cent in the Ben Davis, and 130 hundredthousandths of 1 per cent in the more odorous crab apple.

These data are interesting, and they may lead to the development of more highly flavored apples, if these are

example from Lord Bacon's essay on Gardens, and note the understanding with which he refers to the smell of flowers in comparison with any book on the subject written in our own times. He says:

Because the breath of flowers is far sweeter in the air (where it comes and goes like the

wanted. The work shows also that by warbling of music) than in the hand, there

patient and diligent research we can proceed to the quantitive determination of odorous bodies. But the information is only desultory, and it does not reveal to us the empire of the nose.

Again, Messrs Allison, Katz and Egy of the United States Bureau of Mines, have been studying the uses of stenches as warnings in mines, so that the miners may smell danger before it reaches them, provided the authorities are informed in time and are able to pump the odorous body to them in the air with which they operate their drills. They constructed their own olfactometer, which is described in Technical Paper 244 of that bureau (1920), and they found that, by using very pungent, unpleasant odors, they might make very little of the stench do its work. They discovered that butyl mercaptan, which smells something like a ripe old sourkraut made of garlic, only a thousand times more so, to say it in Irish, was enough to induce the men to rush out of the mine at full speed, if pumped in at the rate of five cubic centimeters per one thousand cubic feet of air, and that it was carried to all parts of a large, deep mine in twenty minutes. Of course, as the air is exhausted from the drills the dilution becomes much greater than five half thimblefuls to a thousand cubic

feet. Now this is good work; it is splendid, life-saving work, but it does not make us wise in our noses, which is what we are after.

It is evident from the literature of three hundred years ago-I refer now to belles-lettres, and not to the literature of science that our noses must have atrophied in the meantime. Let us cite an

fore nothing is more fit for that delight than to know what be the flowers and plants that do best perfume the air. Roses, damask and red, are fast flowers of their smell, so that you may walk by a whole row of them and find nothing of their sweetness; yea, though it be in a morning's dew.

Observe, please, his use of the expression, "fast flowers of their smell"! Since his day we have lost the use of the word in this connection, although we have kept it in regard to colors.

Bays [he continues] likewise yield no smell as they grow, rosemary little, nor sweet marjoram; that which yields the sweetest smell in the air is the violet, especially the double white violet which comes twice a year, about the middle of April and about Bartholomew-tide. [St. Bartholomew's day is August 24th of our calendar.] Next to that is the musk rose, then the strawberry leaves dying, with a most excellent cordial smell; then the flower of the vines, it is a little dust, like the dust of a Bent which grows upon the cluster in the first coming forth; then sweetbrier, then wall-flowers which are very delightful to be set under a parlour or lower chamber window; then pinks and gilliflowers, specially the matted pink and clove gilliflower, then the flowers of the lime tree; then the honeysuckles, so that they be somewhat afar off. Of bean-flowers I speak not, because they are field flowers, but those which perfume the air most delightfully, not passed by as the rest, but being trodden upon or crushed, are three; that is burnet, wild thyme, and water-mints; therefore you are to set whole alleys of them to have the pleasure when you walk or tread.

Shakespeare is so full of references to smells, he uses the sense with such gusto and with such familiarity withal, that nearly a whole column of the concord

ance is necessary to give room for the single lines in fine print in which the word smell occurs. We could spend hours on these references to smell in Shakespeare, but we shall content ourselves with a single very familiar passage from "Midsummer Night's Dream," in which Oberon describes to Puck the couch of Titania.

"I know a bank whereon the wild thyme blows,

Where ox-lips and the nodding violet grows; Quite overcanopied with lush woodbine, With sweet musk roses and with eglantine: There sleeps Titania, some time of the night,

Lull'd in these flowers with dances and

delight."

Every flower mentioned distills fragrance into the air. They are all distinguished for their odors. When we read or hear it recited, we see a picture. As Puck heard it from Oberon in the days of Queen Bess the impression was more than doubled, because he obtained from the same words, besides the picture, a lush olfactory consciousness. We miss this exaltation because we have degenerated.

Whichever way we look it seems as though the obligation to make this world better were upon the men of science. Here is a world of joy and delight which we have lost, through mere inertia. Who would not give up many of his present days to go back for a single afternoon and bask in Lord Bacon's garden, and with the nose to smell of its loveliness?

Now I hold no brief against fashions and styles; against the ugly cut of men's clothes, nor the cutting away of those of women; against the dances of the day, or even, if we must have them, the socalled musical comedies, or Sunday newspapers, or anything that is ours, if only we were willing to step out of the rut of our crass Philistinism. It makes us complacent and content to slide along an ugly railroad track, ever away from the gardens of delight that are ours but for the asking.

It is the stupidity of the enjoyment of this our own generation that is so offensive, if we would but consider it. Here we live our little short day, and it seems as if the only thing we could do was to make a monstrous noise, like a cricket. Will my lords and ladies amuse themselves?

Aye, they would dance.

Then ho for some music! Bring a troubadour with his harp, a player with his viol d'amour, and a clavichord, for the moon is bright and 'tis the hour for dancing. Let there be played music composed when fairies lived and men communed with them and bethought. themselves of melodies so lovely that the tunes themselves were fragrant. Call upon the spirit of Mozart to lead them; good players with rich, mellow instruments!

But, no; my lords and ladies will have none of it. They desire drums and tomtoms and rattling sticks and a piano box, all played by human apes to the sound of cannibal screeches and grunts from the heart of Africa.

I don't mind the ugliness of it; ugliness has its uses; it is the stupidity of it all-and what they miss!

If we would have fragrance in the world again, if we would make it lovely once more in spite of strikes and riots and rights that are wrongs, I'm afraid chemists will have to begin. They must make a convention of smelling, and seek and find and teach the wisdom

of the nose. Therefore, I propose as a beginning the organization and study of olfactory analysis, in the hope that it may lead to making the human nose useful. We are such Philistines that we will not even sniff unless there is profit in it. So let's establish the profit of sniffing. Then better days will come.

The problem is difficult in the beginning, because we cannot write out a smell. Letters and words are meant for the eye, and not for the nose. If I say a substance smells to me like cinnamon it may not smell like cinnamon at all to you. I may be thinking of cinnamon

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