MARVELS OF SCIENCE.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LV, Issue 65, 3 August 1912, Page 4

MARVELS OF SCIENCE.

In. a chemist's tost lube, shown at a recent meeting of the British Society of Chemical Industry, there was seen a yellowish, sticky substance, which, according to all precedent, had no right to be there. It was rubber, and never before. until that evening, had rubber been 6een in a test tube. The usual place in which to look for it. is the rubber tree, from which it flows in the form of a natural juice. For years .past, however, chemists, thn inn pic ia us of the modem world, have been searching for a means of making rubber in the laboratory, and Professor Perkin, of Manchester University, son of the discoverer of aniline dyes, has announced, on 'behalf of a group of chemists, of whom he was one, that success has attended their researches. Rubber, it is hoped, can now be manufactured at a cost of a shilling a pound and put on the market at haif-a-crown a pound. There are considerations that will appeal to the • business man. and ultimately to the public who use rubber in many forms. The discovery, however, suggests other thoughts. Seventy yeas ago organic chemistry was the chemistry of vital products—of compounds that could not be made by man. To-day there is no such thing as organic chemistry—except in name—for the chemist, lias been able to make- many products in his laboratory, which it was once thought could only be manufactured in Nature's workshop. Yet in all his researches, the scientist comes to a dead stop, ballied by a tiny speck of living matter that can only 'be seen under a powerful microscope. But it,lives and moves, and with all their astounding skill chemists have not yet been able to produce from any inorganic, and artificial substances the most minute living organism.