Textiles offer an attractive field for investigation. Can you analyze a sample of goods for wool and cotton? What dyes will not "take" on cotton? Do you understand the principles of union dyeing? What is an assistant, a leveling agent, a mordant? Could you dye three samples of wool yam three different colors with alizarin? If the electric current is available in your school, what work have you done with electroplating? Have you made white lead, iodoform, canarin, or potassium permanganate by electrolysis? If you are teaching in a rural school, there is the field of agricultural chemistry. Have you tested the soil in the nearby cornfield for phosphates, nitrates, and potassium compounds? Do you know how to make the insecticides: kerosene einulsion, lime-sulfur, Bordeaux mixture, Paris green, lead arsenate? Could you analyze a sample of paint and determine whether its base was zinc or lead? Is the water in your neighborhood temporary or permanent hard water? Is there any starch in an apple, a cucumber, a beet? Have you done the Bahcock test for cream in milk? If you teach girls, then you have the field of household chemistry. Can you prepare baking soda by the Solvay process? Can you make gwd soap? Do you know how to prepare chemically pure salt? Have you tested the various brands of household ammonia for their relative values? Is there any phosphate in Oakite, or carbonate in Lux? When your students know that you are working along advanced lines and see the samples you are frequently putting out, the effect upon them is very stimulating. Some of them may feel the-urge to go a little deeper into the fascinating realm of chemistry. And as you advance, becoming more and more the master of your selected topics, you will feel a growing sense of power and confidence so that when some bright youngster wants to try work a little beyond that which the others are doing, you are all ready for him and can suggest interesting lines for him to follow as fast as his required experiments are out of the way. The suggestions given above cover only a few of the many possibilities lying ready a t every teacher's door. Get a good handbook of directions, pay out a dollar or two for chemicals not already in the school stock and go to work with a will. You will find the effort well worthwhile and the work fascinating, for you will learn much and enjoy a growing sense of mastery as you proceed.
W h y Dividends Stop. "I recently looked over the balance sheet of a large corporation that hadn't paid a dividend in ten years," says R. Perry Shorts, a banker, "I couldn't account for its poor showing until I finally learned that it had never spent a cent for research. Gradually its business had gone to pot, and it hadn't spent a nickel to find out why, or to create new ideas with which to meet the everchanging conditions of the times."-Chem. & You, 6, 3 (1929).
