It governs the
transformation of the salts, minerals and humus of our fields and the
components of the air into corn, wheat, cotton and the innumerable other
products of the soil; it governs no less the transformation of crude
ores into steel and alloys, which, with the cunning born of chemical
knowledge, may be given practically any conceivable quality of hardness,
elasticity, toughness or strength. And exactly the same thing may be
said of the hundreds of national activities that lie between the two
extremes of agriculture and steel manufacture!
Moreover, the domain of the science of the transformation of matter
includes even life itself as its loftiest phase: from our birth to our
return to dust the laws of chemistry are the controlling laws of life,
health, disease and death, and the ever clearer recognition of this
relation is the strongest force that is raising medicine from the
uncertain realm of an art to the safer sphere of an exact science. To
many scientific minds it has even become evident that those most
wonderful facts of life, heredity and character, must find their final
explanation in the chemical composition of the components of life
producing, germinal protoplasm: mere form and shape are no longer
supreme but are relegated to their proper place as the housing only of
the living matter which functions chemically.
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