Do you remember how often, during the months immediately following our entrance into the great conflict, one heard the assertion made that American inventive genius would eventually produce a weapon so dreadful, so potent, that it would end the war because flesh and blood would be unable to withstand it? It was asserted, with a wealth of circumstantial detail, that Mr. Edison had been locked up for weeks in his New Jersey laboratory perfecting a device for the wholesale slaughter of the Huns which would startle the world. But, as the war continued on its bloody course, the public faith in inventors gradually waned and the American people settled down to a realization that victory could be achieved only by man-power, munitions, and food. Yet the persons who talked so glibly of some startling discovery which would paralyze the efforts of the enemy and abruptly end the war little realized how near to the truth their imaginations led them—_for the government actually had in its possession the secret of a weapon so terrible that, had it been used, it would probably have ended the war_. The story of how the secret came into the possession of the government is a curious one. Years ago a student of chemistry, then living in a foreign country, while carrying on a series of laboratory experiments, stumbled upon a chemical combination which almost cost him his life. It was a compound never before made, or, at least, never recorded. Later the chemist came to the United States, but it was not until he read of the use of toxic-gases by the Germans that he recalled his all but fatal experiment of many years before. He kept silence, however, until America’s entry into the war, when he imparted his formula to the government. The chemist’s assertions of what his compound could accomplish were at first received with considerable scepticism, but this scepticism abruptly disappeared when the reports from the Research Division of the Chemical Warfare Service at American University, where the formula was developed, were received. So appalling was its nature, indeed, that the War Department at first refused to permit the use of the weapon thus strangely placed in its hand on the ground that the nation using it would be guilty of inhumanity. But in July, 1918, following the wholesale use of mustard-gas against our troops by the Germans, the scruples of those in power disappeared and orders were given that quantity production of the new toxic material should immediately be begun.