The things we do!

It is rather like an industrial by-product
that has needed some slight change or adaptation to make it more valuable
to society than the original product upon which the manufacturers had kept
their attention fixed--or, at any rate, to make the margin of profit in
the whole industry greater. Out of once discarded, seemingly valueless
matter have come our coal-tar products: saccharine many times sweeter than
sugar, colors unknown to the old dyers, perfumes as fragrant as those
distilled from flowers, medicines potent to allay fevers. Up in the woods
of Canada last summer I found a chemist trying to do with the wood waste
what Remsen and Perkin and others have done with coal waste, and I cannot
resist the suggestion of my metaphor that there in the forest valleys
beyond the Alleghanies the elements and conditions were found to convert
this Atlantic by-product, unpromising outwardly, into the substance of a
new and precious civilization.
This overmountain procession came chiefly up the watercourses of the south
and middle States.


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