Legacy of the Centuries

No one knows for how many centuries this wealth has lain here. There are no voices to tell us how it was in those alternate millenniums of sun and rain. The things that strode the jungles and threw their challenge to the stars survive now only as outlines dimly red from the rocks.

Mountains where the storms gathered are gone. where once no rivers ran. But time, though it be slow, is never still. And movement, be it imperceptible, is movement still. The trees fell and were buried, rotting things mingled with the soil that gave them birth.

They mixed and blended one with the other, and time did the rest. the rest. Deep in the sunless caverns of the earth that gathered a black sluggish mud-like liquid, waiting it would seem for us. And we are here now to claim our own. We have come of it for us the legacy of the century. The National Broadcasting Company in cooperation

with the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation presents Legacy of the Centuries, the story of the petrochemical industry in the South. For nine successive weeks now we have been following a long trail that has wound through the cities and the crossroads of the American South, reporting what we believe to be one of the most remarkable developments of our time,

the renaissance of industry, culture, and the changes in the whole pattern of life, as lived in the states below the line of Mason and Dixon. Our guide on this journey is NBC correspondent Henry Cassidy. Today he reports on a remarkable new industry whose very name was unknown a few short years ago. Mr. Cassidy.

As a war correspondent, during the crowded years of the rise and unlimited demease of Adolf Hitler, I often pondered why it was that change in living, in thought or in form of government must so often be accompanied by violence and pain, by sound and fury.