Nor is that pile of sawdust back of the sawmill any more. The butchers want it for their floors, but that isn't the most economical use for it. There are acetic acid, wood alcohol, naphtha, wood-tar (and all that that implies) to be had from the distillation of sawdust--to say nothing of sugar from birch sawdust. The reason there isn't more money in the sawdust than in sashes, doors, and blinds which the factory turns out is because we have more faith in cog-wheels than we have in test tubes.
In machinery, big or little, Americans stand at the head of the class; in industrial chemistry they are at the foot of the class.
We pay the Germans about ten times what we ought to for phenacetin, because we can't get it into our heads that there is any money in applied organic chemistry. Coal-tar was once a nuisance, but the Germans make indigo so much better and cheaper from it now that they have put the indigo-plant out of business.
The red trousers of the French soldiers are dyed with German alizarin, also a coal-tar product, because it doesn't pay to raise madder any longer. In coal-tar are all sorts of valuable drugs, dyes, and perfumes. But we don't know it--industrially.
Stay! I do my country an injustice. We can make moth-balls and carbolic acid. But that is as much as ever we can do. And this is why we do not utilize the saw-dust and make a better business out of it than the sawmill can.
And garbage! I wonder how much orange-peel and lemon-peel is thrown away in New York City every day, and how much the neroli or essential oil that could be got from it would be worth. I wonder if the stalks and fag-ends of vegetables could not be distilled and something made from them. But the limit of our wisdom in regard to garbage is: burn it and get power from it. Somebody is going to get rich from this garbage problem one of these days. But it will be the test-tube and not the cogwheel that will make the money. It will be the industrial chemist, not the mechanic.
See what a difference such knowledge has made in the wool industry. Sheep's wool is dirty and greasy when it comes to the mills. Wash it with strong alkali in running water. That is what has always been done. But a man in Massachusetts thought it would be a good idea to dissolve the grease with some such solvent as naphtha. He saved the naphtha to use over again; he recovered the grease, which is the most softening and penetrating of all fats and is most valuable for ointments, and he recovered carbonate of potash. Sheep wearing heavy wool in the hot weather perspire freely, and this perspiration contains carbonate of potash.