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Show REVIEWS DE ELOPMENT OF SCIENCE OF WAR Included in the recent annual report re-port of Secretary Franklin K. Lane is the following: "When the Bureau of Mines was created by Congress five ears ago .it was hardly to have been imagined that the methods used for the saving of life in the coal mines of the United Uni-ted States would become, of vital use in the problem of saving lives and destroying lives in a world war; yet this is just what has happened. "The soldier's kit, which wTas so simple a thing in other wars, has had to be increased by a gas mask not unlike the helmet of a deep-sea diver, with a box of chemicals adapted adapt-ed for offsetting the effects of the various kinds of gas the enemy is known to use. "When we came into the war we found ourselves prepared with the knowledge, the machinery,, and the men to promptly meet the need of gas masks in great quantity and of a superior type. Thus the men who had been on this work of meeting the gases compounded in nature's laboratory were found to have a reserve re-serve of knowledge as to what gases will kill and what will choke and what will burn and what will hasten disease, which in a war of cumulative cumula-tive frightfulness would make the United States modestly distinguished distinguish-ed if it wished so to shine. As one of the group said: ' " 'We chemists in America have never turned our minds to the destruction de-struction of human life. Our work has been constructive the chemistry chemis-try of the soil, of cement, of printer's print-er's ink, of the by-products from petroleum and tar, of -10,000 things which will make for a longer, -a hap-;pier hap-;pier life for man. But if the world is to be turned upside down and instead in-stead of 'staying death and disease and making new things that man can use for his own ennoblement we are wanted to push forward the work of the destruction of man and all his works we -can become rivals of the worst in such enterprise.' "This is not the time to present the things done and the things doing by these men of the necromatic science, sci-ence, but when the day , comes for casting up accounts and giving credit cred-it their work will not go Unrecognized. Unrecog-nized. " |