Germany had a natural monopoly of potash as Chile had a natural monopoly of nitrates.  The agriculture of Europe and America has been virtually dependent upon these two sources of plant foods.  Now when the world was cleft in twain by the shock of August, 1914, the Allied Powers had the nitrates and the Central Powers had the potash.  If Germany had not had up her sleeve a new process for making nitrates she could not long have carried on a war and doubtless would not have ventured upon it.  But the outside world had no such substitute for the German potash salts and has not yet discovered one.  Consequently the price of potash in the United States jumped from $40 to $400 and the cost of food went up with it.  Even under the stimulus of prices ten times the normal and with chemists searching furnace crannies and bad lands the United States was able to scrape up less than 10,000 tons of potash in 1916, and this was barely enough to satisfy our needs for two weeks!

[Illustration:  What happened to potash when the war broke out.  This diagram from the Journal of Industrial and Engineering Chemistry of July, 1917, shows how the supply of potassium muriate from Germany was shut off in 1914 and how its price rose.]

Yet potash compounds are as cheap as dirt.  Pick up a handful of gravel and you will be able to find much of it feldspar or other mineral containing some ten per cent. of potash.  Unfortunately it is in combination with silica, which is harder to break up than a trust.

But “constant washing wears away stones” and the potash that the metallurgist finds too hard to extract in his hottest furnace is washed out in the course of time through the dropping of the gentle rain from heaven.  “All rivers run to the sea” and so the sea gets salt, all sorts of salts, principally sodium chloride (our table salt) and next magnesium, calcium and potassium chlorides or sulfates in this order of abundance.  But if we evaporate sea-water down to dryness all these are left in a mix together and it is hard to sort them out.  Only patient Nature has time for it and she only did on a large scale in one place, that is at Stassfurt, Germany.  It seems that in the days when northwestern Prussia was undetermined whether it should be sea or land it was flooded annually by sea-water.  As this slowly evaporated the dissolved salts crystallized out at the critical points, leaving beds of various combinations.  Each year there would be deposited three to five inches of salts with a thin layer of calcium sulfate or gypsum on top.  Counting these annual layers, like the rings on a stump, we find that the Stassfurt beds were ten thousand years in the making.  They were first worked for their salt, common salt, alone, but in 1837 the Prussian Government began prospecting for new and deeper deposits and found, not the clean rock salt that they wanted, but bittern, largely magnesium sulfate or Epsom salt, which is not at all nice for table use.  This