I have been asked to discuss "what nutrition means and could mean to the welfare of the Nation,"

It means the freeing of perhaps one-third of our people from ills directly or indirectly due to food conditions.

It could mean, also, the building of higher health and efficiency in people who are already well and efficient.

The first of these aspects is clearly an urgent essential of National defense, and an obvious duty to our fellow-citizens. The second aspect can mean an advance of even more far-reaching significance.

Let us consider the more obvious first. The estimate that something like onethird of our people are ill-nourished had its first scientific basis in studies of food consumption. Especially did the comprehensive data of Stiebeling and co-workers, with their interpretations in the light of the most exact knowledge of nutritional requirements, indicate an unexpectedly high incidence of deficiency of one kind or another.

That the magnitude of this national ill had not been appreciated before is explained by two facts. First, for reasons largely economic, food conditions had grown worse than most of us knew. Secondly, no one could know, until now, the complexity of nutritional needs, or the great responsibility of nutrition to health, which the most recent research has revealed and is still revealing.

Medicine has recently and rapidly developed a keen nutrition consciousness. It is finding in nutrition the solutions of many of its most baffling problems.

What's To Be Done?

With this knowledge, what is to be done? Lord Aster put the answer in the simplest possible terms when he said: "It isn't only

that the people must have enough food; they must have enough of the right kinds of food." And for the kinds which are most to be emphasized McCollum has given us the useful term protective foods.

How to bring enough of the protective foods into the dietaries of all the people is both an economic and an educational problem.

It is important that both these parts of the problem be clearly and frankly recognized. Starting with ordinary or typical American dietaries of all economic levels the chief direction for nutritional improvement is to increase the proportion of calories taken in the form of the protective foods fruits, vegetables, and milk in its various forms. In most low-income dietaries the place occupied by these foods is far below what anyone acquainted with the newer knowledge of nutrition can consider adequate.

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Better growth and development, higher attainment in stamina and working efficiency, and a longer lease of healthier and more useful life, may all be realized in the same individuals through the fuller use of the newest knowledge of nutrition.

Obviously there has not yet been time to study entire human life-cycles directly. But the nutritional improvement of health has been studied both in children and grown people; and large numbers of controlled experiments covering entire lives (and even of successive generations) have been made with laboratory animals.

Experiments

Naturally we select, to serve as our deputy in such cases, a species whose nutrition is essentially like our own in respect to the factors and processes under investigation. The rat has been largely used in full-life experiments. The only known important differ

ence between human and rat nutrition is that we are much more responsive to the ascorbic and nicotinic acid values of the food, than is the rat. Thus there is definite evidence (amply convincing if one has time to study it thoroughly) that the nutritional improvements shown in experiments with rats are well within the scientific probabilities of the benefits which nutrition can bring to human beings.

The finding which has, perhaps, attracted most attention because it was least expected, is the well-marked and statistically established increase in the average length of normal adult life the life-expectation of the normal adult.

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Previous services of science to health had not advanced this expectation. A nutritional improvement which consisted simply in changing the quantitative proportions of the natural foods used, increased the life-cycle by 10 percent.

As already explained, this is considerably within what the same nutritional knowledge may be expected to do for human lives. A simple approximation of a sound scientific probability would be to say that the present-day science of nutrition offers an extra decade to the human life lived under its guidance.

And the extra years, whatever their number may be, are not added to old age. They are best conceived as inserted at the apex of the prime of life. In fact the real reason the life is longer is because it has been lived on a higher plane throughout; somewhat as the

cannon of superior range and power throws its projectile both higher and farther.

Increased Efficiency

Is the promise of increased efficiency through nutrition as valid for mental as for muscular work? Yes, and for two reasons.

First, no matter how brainy a man's work may be, his ability to do it effectively depends upon the stamina of his organism.

Secondly, nutrition affects the level of health and stamina largely by its influence upon the body's internal environment. Here the blood is the great mediator; and the same blood circulates through all the organs of the body, carrying the fluctuations which dietary differences induce, for better or worse, to the brain, and the nerves, and the muscles, and the liver alike.

Nutrition can never be a cure-all.

Handicaps may be inherited (or even acquired through bad habits) which are beyond being completely remedied by nutrition alone. So even the best of nutrition could not be expected to make all people equally vigorous and efficient.

But starting with each as is, what proportion of already healthy people could by nutritional means be improved in stamina and efficiency? Probably such a large majority that only an extraordinary egotist would believe. himself an exception after openminded study of the evidence.

Accessions of workers in manufacturing plants in March reached the highest rate for any March since 1934. The Bureau of Labor Statistics' monthly survey of labor turn-over covering 7,300 plants employing nearly 3,100,000 wage earners, showed an average accession rate of 5.62 per 100 workers on the pay roll.

This rate represented a sharp increase over the February figure (4.92) and also over the March 1940 rate of 2.94. Voluntary separations or quits reported at the rate of 1.70 per 100 employees in March represented a greater percentage of all separations than in any month on record, reflecting the widespread opportunities for reemployment in the current labor market.

This comparatively high quit rate was accompanied by the lowest lay-off rate (1.06) recorded during the past 11 years, indicating the need for workers brought about by the rapidly expanding production schedules of defense industries.

Spurred by National Defense

High accession rates continued in most industries manufacturing materials required by the national defense program. Shipbuilding registered a hiring rate of 13.88 per 100 employees, aircraft, 8.65, electrical machinery, 6.59, and foundries and machine shops, 6.84.

Other industries reporting high rates were cement with 11.73, furniture, 7.34, and slaugh

tering and meat packing, 8.47.

Seasonal influences were reflected in the decline in the lay-off rate in the cement industry where the rate decreased from 4.75 to 0.64; slaughtering and meat packing from 8.30 to 4.53; rubber boots and shoes, 3.06 to 0.98 per 100 employees.

Military separations which have been included with miscellaneous separations since September 1940 account largely for the increase shown in that class of separations. In September when miscellaneous separations in manufacturing industries were reported at the rate of 0.21 per 100 workers, those leaving for military service constituted 51 percent of the total.

In March with a rate of 0.43, the proportion of military separations had increased to 63 percent. These percentages are based on reports received from establishments which have listed their military separations as such, and cover more than 75 percent of the employees in the entire labor turn-over sample.

Natural Resins

A threatened shortage in certain natural resins essential to the manufacture of paints and other protective coatings has been averted through speedy operation of machinery set up by the Division of Purchases to anticipate and deal with scarcities in the protective coatings field.

Ordinarily, about 20,000 tons of such natural resins as kauri, batu, elemi and damar

are required annually in the United States. These resins come from the Orient; lack of shipping recently caused some 5,000 tons to accumulate at Singapore, Batavia and Macassar awaiting shipment. Best efforts of the importers to obtain shipping space proved fruitless.

The problem was taken up with the Maritime Commission and with the Netherlands Legation in Washington. As a result, shipping space has been made available for transport of the needed materials.

Six of the leading fertilizer manufacturers of the United States, estimated to account for more than 41 percent of the total business in such lines, reported consolidated sales aggregating $76,250,353 for 1939, according to a survey* recently conducted by the Federal Trade Commission. Only 3.3 percent of the total represented export and foreign business.

The preliminary report of the Bureau of the Census for 1939 shows that the combined "value of products" for "fertilizer" manufacturers, on an establishment basis, amounted to $185,684,328. Details of the Census report

are contained in the latter part of this release.

Scope of the Survey

The industrial classification "fertilizer" as used in the survey of the Federal Trade Commission, refers to corporations primarily engaged in the manufacture of various kinds of complete and incomplete fertilizers; and fertilizer materials and superphosphates.

In general the survey is confined to a presentation of basic data, in amount of money value, together with the mathematical ratios and percentages derived from such data.

Data are shown in combined form and, therefore, in a manner which does not identify the results of any individual corporation.

In general, the reports combined for this survey cover the calendar year, but in some cases they cover the varying fiscal years of the respective corporations which ended nearest to the end of the calendar year.

Data for 1939 were obtained from financial reports submitted to the Commission; information for 1938 was obtained from annual reports

of public record made by the corporations, or from balance sheets submitted to the Commission.

Operating Ratios

All of the corporations surveyed were called upon to submit income and expense statements showing the principal elements of the cost of goods sold, such as direct materials, production wages and salaries. One corporation replied to the effect that it could not segregate the material and labor elements of cost of goods sold. Because of this situation, the material and labor elements have been combined in one amount for the 6 corporations in the combined income and expense statement. The 1939 operating ratios for the 6 fertilizer corporations show that the cost of the goods sold represented 83 cents of every dollar of sales.

Of the total cost of goods sold, raw materials and production wages and salaries combined represented 69 percent of sales; other cost and expenses (not listed under "Expenses"), 8 percent; depreciation and obsolescence applying to production facilities, 3.8 percent; and finished goods purchased for resale, 2.2 percent.

The gross margin on sales was 17 cents on each dollar of sales.

The total of items listed as expenses represented 13.9 percent of the total sales, or 13.9 cents of every dollar of sales.

Of this total amount of sales, $73,751,412, or 96.7 percent, represented domestic sales, and $2,498,941, or 3.3 percent, represented export and foreign sales.

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With nearly 900 Weather Bureau stations covering approximately 40,000 miles of airways and 422 teletype stations in the aviation network transmitting hourly reports, the pilots of today's skyliners and military craft receive all the information science has been able to devise to promote safety in flight.

Despite the great advances made in meteorology in recent years, however, experts of the Weather Bureau and other interested government agencies recognize that there is room for improvement, and that such improvement is necessary to keep pace with the rapid expansion now taking place in military and commercial aviation.

One recognized need is the establishment of many more radio sonde stations for the automatic recording of observations made at stratospheric altitudes, which are of vital importance in determining the presence of icing conditions at flight levels or conditions indicating the probability of sudden severe thunderstorms.

At present some 35 radio sonde stations are in operation, each making two observations daily. The need of a denser radio sonde network is generally recognized.

Other devices now receiving a lot of attention are a radio sonde that will float at a given elevation and supply continuous information of changing conditions at that level. Ceiling projectors are not new, but the experts are giving serious study to devising one that will automatically sound an alarm when the cloud-ceiling drops below a certain level.

Television May Play a Part

With new instruments being perfected continually, meteorologists expect television to play an important part in the airways weather service of the future. Some of them even envision the day when complete weather maps may be flashed on a screen in the pilot's cockpit as television develops.

Other possibilities discussed by the experts in the light of recent developments include the evolution of rockets to a point where they can be used to probe conditions much higher into the stratosphere than even the ingen

ious radio sonde, and, in answer to the dream of most pilots, a method for the clearance of fog from landing fields.

While these peeps into the future may sound fantastic, Weather Bureau experts point out that the radio sonde would have sounded equally fantastic before Marconi.

If anybody then had predicted the development of these robots, which send weather reports from the stratosphere daily, his sanity doubtless would have been questioned.

Yet the radio sonde is an accomplished fact and marks one of the greatest steps forward in meteorology.

Robot Weather Station

Another device only very recently might have been included in the category of things to come. It is a robot weather station that can be installed on a remote island or a mountain top, requiring only periodic servicing, and which automatically transmits by radio a continuous report of weather conditions in its locality.

It, too, is a present-day reality and, like the radio sonde, was developed by the National Bureau of Standards in cooperation with the Weather Bureau and the U. S. Navy.

In the early days of aviation weather information was practically limited to the pilot's judgment of what the weather might be as indicated by local signs. If the weather looked good when a flight was contemplated the pilot took off and trusted to luck as to what kind of weather might be encountered during the course of his flight or at destination.