"We will allow you to be provided with ammunition with which to kill our soldiers".' But surely the speaker ought to have known that the then Solicitor-General, Sir F. E. Smith, had only a week before announced a wonderful 'new discovery', made in 1779, which bore very directly on the provision of ammunition for Germany. In the performance of professional duties which required some knowledge of fats as a source of explosives the Solicitor-General is reported in The Times of July 21 to have announced, in the Prize Court concerned with alleged contraband from America, 'that it had recently been discovered that glycerine could be made from lard'. The Times, too, accepted and proclaimed the absurd blunder in large capitals at the head of the paragraph.
In order that our lawyer-politicians and the powerful but silent services which they represent in Parliament may know what their neglect of science has done and is doing for our enemies, I will now state as briefly as possible the essential facts concerning the making of powerful smokeless, propulsive ammunition of every kind as used for military purposes.
The fact that a 'sweet principle' can be extracted from oils and fats was probably known long before 1779, when Scheele, a Swedish pharmacist and great discoverer, first definitely separated glycerine in the preparation of lead-plaster by boiling lard or olive oil with litharge (oxide of lead). The purification of glycerine by steam-distillation was patented in 1855. The conversion of glycerine into the powerful explosive trinitroglycerine, a heavy oily liquid, was first effected in 1847 by Sobrera, and on a commercial scale by Nobel in 1863. The great dangers attending the use of the new explosive were removed in 1866–7, when Nobel con-