PAPER AND PAPER STANDARDS. 397 



tical empiric, supported by an amiable, i.e., long-suffering, 

 capitalist, who had undertaken a scheme of making paper 

 from "spent" hops. Of course it is known to the enlightened 

 that paper can be made from anythingfrom thistledown to deal 

 boards, or should the vegetable world fail us, from asbestos 

 to china clay. The initial advantage of a raw material cost- 

 ing nothing had appealed to the capitalist, and his empiric 

 "will-o'-the-wisp" was justified by the above luminous 

 generalisation rising from the morass of technical stagna- 

 tion. But the point of our story is in a later episode. Our 

 pioneer friend had been advised to boil his spent hops with 

 milk of lime. An order had been sent to one of our whole- 

 sale druggists (sometimes mis-named " chemists ") for a 

 supply of the material, and when we came on the scene we 

 found that to this order Calcium lactate had been supplied 

 and was being freely used in the boiling of the spent hops. 



For the pathos and comedy of spent hopes we doubt 

 whether the chemist's experience can be equalled ! 



We have not forgotten that we are writing about a 

 specific subject, neither have we forgotten that readers of 

 Science Progress are not of the order to be impressed by 

 text-book disquisitions on scientific matters. The technical 

 history of paper and the chemistry of the raw materials of 

 which it is composed are ofttold stories. What we may 

 point out without risking an accusation of tedious iteration, 

 is that the writing and printing papers of our date are 

 extremely " select " as regards raw materials. Of the 

 hundred and forty and four thousand possible sources of 

 supply, we have narrowed down to some half-dozen of the 

 vegetable fibrous substances. Thus of the dicotyledons, 

 one seed hair (cotton) and two bast fibres (flax and hemp) ; 

 of the sub-class gymnosperms the wood-cells (fibres) of the 

 stems of conifers ; of the monocotyledons the stem tissues 

 of the cereal straws and of esparto. 



These materials are employed not in their raw con- 

 dition. They are chemically treated for the isolation of 

 cellulose. The treatments are designed to remove their 

 more reactive or non-cellulose groups and to leave a 

 chemically inert or non-reactive residue. Such is the com- 



