was in rivaling Nature in the manufacture of one of her own choice
products. This is alizarin, the coloring matter contained in the madder
root. It was an ancient and oriental dyestuff, known as "Turkey red" or
by its Arabic name of "alizari." When madder was introduced into France
it became a profitable crop and at one time half a million tons a year
were raised. A couple of French chemists, Robiquet and Colin, extracted
from madder its active principle, alizarin, in 1828, but it was not
until forty years later that it was discovered that alizarin had for its
base one of the coal-tar products, anthracene. Then came a neck-and-neck
race between Perkin and his German rivals to see which could discover a
cheap process for making alizarin from anthracene. The German chemists
beat him to the patent office by one day! Graebe and Liebermann filed
their application for a patent on the sulfuric acid process as No. 1936
on June 25, 1869. Perkin filed his for the same process as No. 1948 on
June 26. It had required twenty years to determine the constitution of
alizarin, but within six months from its first synthesis the commercial
process was developed and within a few years the sale of artificial
alizarin reached $8,000,000 annually. The madder fields of France were
put to other uses and even the French soldiers became dependent on
made-in-Germany dyes for their red trousers. The British soldiers were
placed in a similar situation as regards their red coats when after
1878 the azo scarlets put the cochineal bug out of business.

The modern chemist has robbed royalty of its most distinctive insignia,
Tyrian purple. In ancient times to be "porphyrogene," that is "born to
the purple," was like admission to the Almanach de Gotha at the present
time, for only princes or their wealthy rivals could afford to pay $600
a pound for crimsoned linen. The precious dye is secreted by a
snail-like shellfish of the eastern coast of the Mediterranean. From a
tiny sac behind the head a drop of thick whitish liquid, smelling like