possibility created by the imagination, for our economic history contains instance after instance of the purposeful undermining and destruction of our industries in finer chemicals, dyes and drugs by foreign interests bent on preserving their monopoly.  If one recalls that through control, for instance, of dyes by a competing nation, control is in fact also established over products, valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars, in which dyes enter as an essential factor, one may realize indeed the tremendous industrial and commercial power which is controlled by the single lever—­chemical dyes.  Of even more vital moment is chemistry in the domain of health:  the pitiful calls of our hospitals for local anesthetics to alleviate suffering on the operating table, the frantic appeals for the hypnotic that soothes the epileptic and staves off his seizure, the almost furious demands for remedy after remedy, that came in the early years of the war, are still ringing in the hearts of many of us.  No wonder that our small army of chemists is grimly determined not to give up the independence in chemistry which war has achieved for us!  Only a widely enlightened public, however, can insure the permanence of what farseeing men have started to accomplish in developing the power of chemistry through research in every domain which chemistry touches.

The general public should realize that in the support of great chemical research laboratories of universities and technical schools it will be sustaining important centers from which the science which improves products, abolishes waste, establishes new industries and preserves life, may reach out helpfully into all the activities of our great nation, that are dependent on the transformation of matter.

The public is to be congratulated upon the fact that the writer of the present volume is better qualified than any other man in the country to bring home to his readers some of the great results of modern chemical activity as well as some of the big problems which must continue to engage the attention of our chemists.  Dr. Slosson has indeed the unique quality of combining an exact and intimate knowledge of chemistry with the exquisite clarity and pointedness of expression of a born writer.

We have here an exposition by a master mind, an exposition shorn of the terrifying and obscuring technicalities of the lecture room, that will be as absorbing reading as any thrilling romance.  For the 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.