of corn sugar, 625,000,000 pounds of gluten feed, 90,000,000 pounds of
oil and 90,000,000 pounds of oil cake.

Two million bushels of cobs are wasted every year in the United States.
Can't something be made out of them? This is the question that is
agitating the chemists of the Carbohydrate Laboratory of the Department
of Agriculture at Washington. They have found it possible to work up the
corn cobs into glucose and xylose by heating with acid. But glucose can
be more cheaply obtained from other starchy or woody materials and they
cannot find a market for the xylose. This is a sort of a sugar but only
about half as sweet as that from cane. Who can invent a use for it! More
promising is the discovery by this laboratory that by digesting the cobs
with hot water there can be extracted about 30 per cent. of a gum
suitable for bill posting and labeling.

Since the starches and sugars belong to the same class of compounds as
the celluloses they also can be acted upon by nitric acid with the
production of explosives like guncotton. Nitro-sugar has not come into
common use, but nitro-starch is found to be one of safest of the high
explosives. On account of the danger of decomposition and spontaneous
explosion from the presence of foreign substances the materials in
explosives must be of the purest possible. It was formerly thought that
tapioca must be imported from Java for making nitro-starch. But during
the war when shipping was short, the War Department found that it could
be made better and cheaper from our home-grown corn starch. When the war
closed the United States was making 1,720,000 pounds of nitro-starch a
month for loading hand grenades. So, too, the Post Office Department
discovered that it could use mucilage made of corn dextrin as well as
that which used to be made from tapioca. This is progress in the right
direction. It would be well to divert some of the energetic efforts now