| OCR Text |
Show Illlilir HEIIK IX T1IF. YARD. Cheer up. Everybody's good at HOlIH-lllillg. The Italian mind is creative. So is the French. Both France and Italy have done more for creative art than any other nation. Ancient Greece was artistic, but gave it up when she gave up her individuality. The creative mind is always imaginative. im-aginative. Imagination invents. An Italian's imagination made wireless telegraphy possible, and contradiction lias not yet silenced the French claim that Daimler and Farman were the parents of the automobile and the aeroplane. The German is less creative, but he is supremely pains taking and diligent. dili-gent. He has that genius for classification classi-fication that toilsomely elaborates another man's discovery and makes it serviceable. And what of the Yanks? A great European chemist has been kind enough to say that we are marvels at leaping gaps. His compliment carries with it a touch of censure. We have learned in a year and a half how much we can do when we must. The fiction that Germany could do certain things better than any other nation is now-exploded. now-exploded. That Germany did so is undisputable, but that was because America did't try. We must lay the blame on our lack of patience; we can't plead lack of aptitude. This is not a vainglorious fanfaronade. fanfar-onade. Of all that enormous list of products for which we depended absolutely ab-solutely on Germany there is ' none that we are not now providing here at home or its substitute. We realized, re-alized, when we had to, that Germany's Ger-many's supremacy in chemistry was due to our disinclination to challenge it. During the last two years it became be-came necessary to do what Germany had been doing in the dye industry and accordingly it was done. So also with drugs; and now, after a period of months, America's chemical industry indus-try stands in the position which Germany's Ger-many's held entrenched against the world. Potash, salvarsan, the photographic photo-graphic agents, all the coal tar products pro-ducts for which we looked to Ger many as habitually as we look to China and Ceylon for tea, are now in Uncle Sam's back yard between the woodshed and the barn. The fireproof and acid-proof glass of Jena, without which many a chemical chem-ical experiment is impossible, is as necessary today as formerly but we don't send to Jena for it. Nor to Thuringia for the watch crystals which we thought we could get no-where no-where else. Fetish cults are not confined entirely en-tirely to the South Sea Islands and the Congo. It is well that the most mischievous of them all has now been effectually dissipated. w.s.s |
