The British nation is a big consumer of soap. Supplies of animal fat could never keep pace with the demand for this commodity. So the vegetable kingdom was compelled to pay fat tribute to the soap-maker, the coco-nut, palm-kernel, and other exotic nut products furnishing the requisite oil expressed from the fleshy parts of their distinctive fruits. Then the harvests of the sea were found able to contribute impressive supplies of oils. These were likewise impressed into service. While the soap-maker was busily engaged in his task another chemical wizard arose. He had discovered a means of hardening or solidifying fish oils, which naturally are fluid except at very low temperatures. This was a sensational discovery. Hydrogen was the agent which achieved the apparently impossible, but it did far more than merely to harden the oil. By harnessing the gas to this duty the peculiarly pungent aroma, and distinctive taste of the fish, is completely removed from the oil. This scientific achievement brought a further levy of waste into industry. The refuse from whales which had hitherto been permitted to rot, the inedible portions of fish from the canneries, even glut catches of oil-yielding fish for which no profitable market could be found, were treated to secure the oleaginous product, which was subsequently hardened and then turned over to the margarine industry. The hydrogenated fish oil has been found to furnish an excellent butter substitute, and one so closely allied to the genuine article in every essential respect as to demand the evolution of new and more exacting methods to determine its actual origin. It offers the closest approach to butter by synthetic agency which has ever been accomplished up to this time. The striking improvements recorded in the process and manufacture of margarine arrested the attention of the soap-maker. He reflected. Here he was receiving fats of every description to turn them into a product which only realized 4d.--8 cents--a pound. Yet he could take much of that self-same raw material, and by submitting it to another treatment he could produce an article which, as a foodstuff, was worth 1s.--25 cents--a pound. Why should he trouble to turn the fat into soap when he could derive three times the money by transforming it into an article of diet? The war provided him with the opportunity for which he had been waiting patiently. The deficiency in butter supplies had to be remedied with margarine, which the public would have to accept willy-nilly. So the soap-maker switched over all the fresh sound fats from the soap-pans to the margarine mill. To-day thousands of tons of fats which five years ago would have been reduced to soap, this being considered as the only remaining utilization for the waste, is being turned into a food. The table has triumphed over the bath.