respectable and respected friend to the
manufacturer.  Meanwhile the salt and the
sulphuric acid are undergoing such changes, by
heatings and mixings of different kinds, that
they both disappear from the scene ; the
useful product left behind is soda, so valuable
in glass-making, and soap-making, and other
processes : the useless product is an earthy
substance, consisting of calcium and sulphur,
which nobody can apply to any profitable
purpose, nobody will buy, and nobody even
accept as a gift. At a large chemical work
near Newcastle, this product has been
increasing at such a rapid rate that it now forms
a mass six or eight acres in extent, and thirty
or forty feet high : it is a mountain or rather
a table-land of difficulties. Here, then, we see
how chemical manufacturers are saving a
penny out of some of their refuse, and looking
wistfully towards the day when they may
perchance save a penny out of this monstrous
commercial nothing.

Coal proprietors are, perhaps necessarily,
very wasteful people. They accumulate
around the mouths of their pits large heaps
of small coal, which, formerly, rendered
service to no one ; and in some parts of
the country they burn this coal simply
to get rid of it. But, thanks to the
Legislature, it sometimes does good by
interfering in manufacturing affairs. It ordained
that locomotives should not send forth
streams of smoke into the air, and we are
thus freed from a nuisance which sadly
affects our river-steamers and steamer-rivers ;
while, at the same time, coke being used as a
non-smokable fuel, and the supply from the
gas-works being too small, coke-makers have
looked to the heaps of small coal at the pit's
mouth ; and the result is, that thousands of
locomotives are now fed with coke made from
the small waste coal at the collieries. The
railway companies get their coke cheaper
than formerly ; the coal owner makes
something out of a (commercial) nothing ; and the
ground around the coal-pits is becoming
freed from an incumbrance. And what the
coke-makers would leave, if they leave
anything, the artificial fuel makers will buy ; for
in most ot the patent fuels now brought
under public notice, coal-dust is one of the
ingredients.

How to get a pennyworth of beauty out of
old bones and bits of skin, is a problem which
the French gelatine-makers have solved very
prettily. Does the reader remember some
gorgeous sheets of coloured gelatine in the
French department of the Great Exhibition ?
We owed them to the slaughter-houses of
Paris. Those establishments are so well
organised and conducted, that all the refuse
is carefully preserved, to be applied to any
purposes for which it may be deemed fitting.
Very pure gelatine is made from the waste
fragments of skin, bone, tendon, ligature, and
gelatinous tissue of the animals slaughtered
in the Parisian abattoirs : and thin sheets of
this gelatine are made to receive very rich
and beautiful colours. As a gelatinous liquid,
when melted, it is used in the dressing of
woven stuffs, and in the clarification of wine ;
and, as a solid, it is cut into threads for the
ornamental uses of the confectioner, or made
into very thin white and transparent sheets
of papier glacé for copying drawings, or applied
in the making of artificial flowers, or used as
a substitute for paper on which gold printing
may be executed. In good sooth : when an
ox has given us our beef, and our leather, and
our tallow, his career of usefulness is by no
means ended ; we can get a penny out of him
as long as there is a scrap of his substance
above ground.

Dyers and calico-printers, like manufacturing
chemists, have frequently accumulations
of rubbish about their premises, which
they heartily wish to get rid of at any or no
price; and at intervals, by a new item added
to the general stock of available knowledge,
one of these accumulations becomes suddenly
a commercial something. The dye material
called madder will serve to illustrate this as
well as anything else. Madder is the root of
a plant which yields much colouring matter
by steeping in water; and after being so
treated, the spent madder is thrown aside as
a useless refuse. The refuse is not rich
enough for manure; no river conservators
will allow it to be thrown into a running
stream; and the dyer is thus perforce
compelled to give it a homestead somewhere or
other. But, some clear-headed experimenter
has just found out that, actually, one-third of
the colouring matter is left unused in the so-
called spent madder; and he has shown how
to make a pretty penny and an honest penny
out of it, by the aid of certain hot acids.

Whether any perfumed lady would be
disconcerted at learning the sources of her
perfumes, each lady must decide for herself;
but it seems that Mr. De la Rue and Doctor
Hoffman, in their capacities as jurors of the
Great Exhibition, have made terrible havoc
among the perfumery. They have found that
many of the scents said to be procured from
flowers and fruits, are really produced from
anything but flowery sources; the perfumers
are chemists enough to know that similar
odours may be often produced from dissimilar
substances, and if the half-crown bottle of
perfume really has the required odour, the
perfumer does not expect to be asked what
kind of odour was emitted by the substance
whence the perfume was obtained. Now,
Doctor Lyon Playfair, in his summary of the
jury investigation above alluded to, broadly
tells us that these primary odours are often
most unbearable. " A peculiarly fœtid oil,
termed fusel oil, is formed in making brandy
and whiskey ; this fusel oil, distilled with
sulphuric acid and acetate of potash, gives
the oil of pears. The oil of apples is made
from the same fusel oil, by distillation with
sulphuric acid and bichromate of potash.