A Painless Way of Paying War DebtsSource: The Scientific Monthly, Vol. 20, No. 5 (May, 1925), pp. 555-557Published by: American Association for the Advancement of ScienceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/7263 .

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TIHE PROGRESS OF SCIENCE 555

"Yale Bulldog" spirit gains victories in other fields than football, although the papers do not make so much fuss over them.

The material for the new disinfectant comes from that same big black grab-bag from which the chemist has drawn so many useful dyes and drugs, the coal-tar barrel. One of these products, phenol or carbolic acid, is a valuable antiseptic, strong but clumsy, careless in discriminating between the invading microbes and the home guard. It sears the flesh like a hot iron when applied in full strength.

A near relative to phenol is resorcinol, a milder substance which some of us have used in the vain attempt to make two hairs grow on a head where none would grow before. Now both these compounds consist essen- tially of a ring of six carbon atoms, and what Professor Johnson discov- ered was a new way of attaching a chain of carbon atoms to this ring. This enabled him to make a series of similar compounds with side chains composed of from one to any number of carbon links, and it was found that the power to destroy germs increased as the chain was lengthened until there were six carbon atoms in the chain, but fell off thereafter. So the most powerful germicide of this series is the sixth which is accord- ingly called "hexyl-resorcinol," though doubtless a name with less than six syllables will be selected for it before it is put on the market, otherwise people would be reluctant to call for it at the drug store.

Professor Veader Leonard, of Johns Hopkins University, who has been testing the antiseptic power of these compounds, finds this compound is about fifty times as effective as our old carbolic acid. That is to say, it could be diluted with fifty times as much water and would still be as poisonous to the microbes without injuring the bodily tissues. It can be safely taken internally by the mouth, and since it passes out largely through the kidneys it may be used to destroy the microbes and parasites of a tract of the body that has been hitherto difficult of access.

The member of the family with four carbon atoms in the side chain, known as "butyl-resorcinol," is about half as powerful, but may prove quite as useful for such purposes as gargles, tooth-paste and the treatment of skin wounds, for it is stable and has no disagreeable odor.

All these compounds and many others are being systematically pre- pared and their physiological effects investigated by a committee of the National Research Council. Such team work is likely to bring about much better results, quicker and more reliable than the haphazard efforts of isolated individuals. The ideal germicide is yet to be found, and it is quite possible that in time something may be found, or rather made, to take the place of such metallic poisons as mercury and arsenic, which do kill the parasites of the body but not without danger to their host. We also have reason to hope that the chemist may make something that will hunt out and destroy the bacillus of tuberculosis in its most secret lairs.

A PAINLESS WAY OF PAYING

WAR DEBTS

WHEN a man finds himself overwhelmingly in debt and unable even to pay the interest, he naturally thinks of realizing on his real estate, especially if he owns more land than he can work. Why should not a nation do the snam9

France, for instance. France is land poor. The country taken alto- gether is larger than the United States, fifty-four per cent. larger. France has extensive territories in Africa, Asia, America and Oceania which she

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-From a photograph by Julhan Scott DR. W. J. V. OSTERHOUT

Professor of botany in Harvard University, who will become a member of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research.

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THE PROGRESS OF SCIENCE 557

has neither the men nor the money to develop. She has debts that she is too poor to pay.

Among her chief creditors is the United States and among her scat- tered parcels of property is one which is valueless to her but would be of great value to us, that is, French Guiana. This is about the size of Maine, mostly virgin territory, and largely unpopulated. Only about one twenty fifth of one per cent. of the area is under cultivation. It is rich in natural resources, mineral and agricultural, yet the French make no use of it except as a penal colony and are likely to abandon that. Few Frenchmen live there except the convicts and their keepers, so there would be no violation of local patriotic sentiment in its transfer to a foreign flag. If we should accept this territory in lieu of all France owes us we should be paying $156 an acre for it, an absurdly extravagant price, yet we could afford to make a very considerable reduction in our bill against France, for it would be better to have something tangible rather than rely upon promises already partially repudiated.

Great Britain alone among our debtors is paying up, yet she finds the burden of taxation almost intolerable and should be glad to be relieved of part of it by the cession to us of British Guiana. This is larger and richer than the French, yet is unprofitable to the mother country. It is larger than Utah, but less than two per cent. of it is occupied and less than a quarter of one per cent. is under cultivation. Only four per cent. of the scanty population is of European origin. We could not afford to cancel all that England owes us in exchange for British Guiana, for that would figure up about $70 per acre, yet we paid Denmark $500 an acre for the Virgin Islands.

That France and England could get relief from their heavy obliga- tions by selling to the United States their surplus territory in and about the Caribbean Sea has been suggested by Professor Charles Gide, of the Paris Law Faculty, and by Lord Rothermere, brother of Lord Northcliffe. We should hesitate to take at any price the West India islands, for they have scant area and dense population, but the Guianas are the opposite and rather resemble the North American continent when we took posses- sion of it. Under American administration and by means of American machinery the Guianas could be made a source of supply for petroleum, sugar, rice, rubber, beef, hides, lumber, hemp, cocoanut oil, cocoa, fruits and alcohol for motor fuel. This is almost the only undeveloped territory area of all the immense area lying between the Orinoco and the Amazon. Tropical real estate is bound to rise in the future on account of recent scientific discoveries and no country can afford to be without it. In a recent discussion of the problem of British Guiana at the Royal Society Professor L. Knowles said: "I have little doubt that the nation which controls the tropics will in the twentieth century control the most impor- tant raw materials and the growing markets of the world." France and England might well let us have this small fraction of the 2,300,000 square miles that they gained in the war which we aided them +t win

ELECTRIFYING THE SKIN

WHEN sunlight strikes the bare skin it knocks out an electron from one of the atoms on the surface. This discovery was announced before the French Academy of Sciences on March 2 by Jean Said- man.

He stood a man on a stool insulated from the ground by legs of glass or rubber and gave him a certain charge of negative electricity, which of

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