98 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



The term is an entirely correlative one ; what is rubbish to one 

 person under certain circumstances being under altered conditions ex- 

 tremely valuable to another. Gold itself is rubbish in the eyes of a 

 man who is starving on a desert island ; and the pearls which adorn a 

 royal diadem, and have made the fortune of the lucky finder, were 

 probably felt to be worse than useless by the poor oyster, tormented 

 by the presence of some particle of matter which he felt to be de- 

 cidedly " out of place " within his shell. Many a cook, no doubt, has 

 washed the little fresh'-water bleak, a fish about four inches long, and 

 had thoughtlessly poured away the water after the operation, before it 

 occurred %'o the French bead-maker that the lustrous silvery sediment 

 deposited at the bottom of the vessel might be turned to account in 

 the manufacture of artificial pearls, or pearl-beads. 



It is, indeed, strange to consider how many of our most highly 

 prized adornments and our most useful and important manufactures 

 are derived from our own and Nature's refuse. The jet which brings 

 in some twenty thousand pounds a year to the town of Whitby alone 

 is merely a compact, highly lustrous, and deep-black variety of lignite 

 a species of coal less ancient in origin than that of the Carboniferous 

 era which we usually burn. And coal itself, as we know, is merely 

 the refuse of ancient forests and jungles, peat-mosses and cypress- 

 swamps, which has been mineralized in the course of ages and stored 

 for our use in the bowels of the earth. Amber, too, which is also used 

 for ornaments, especially in the East, is but the fossil gum or resin of 

 the Pinites succinifer, large forests of which seem to have existed in 

 the northeast portion of what is now the bed of the Baltic. To the 

 pine-tree this gum was certainly nothing but refuse, a something to be 

 got rid of ; but Nature, who rejects nothing however vile and con- 

 temptible, received it into her lumber-room, her universal storehouse, 

 and, after keeping it patiently much more than the traditional seven 

 years, sends it out again, transformed and yet the same, to adorn the 

 Eastern beauty, and to give employment to many a skillful pair of 

 hands. Bogwood, which, like jet, is used for bracelets, brooches, etc., 

 is merely oak or other hard wood which has lain for years in peat-bogs 

 or marshes, and has acquired its dark coloring from the action of 

 oxidized metal upon the tannin it contained. 



Turning, however, from Nature's processes to those of man, we 

 find that he is doing his best, however clumsily, to follow the thrifty 

 example she sets him. For many and many a year no doubt the pine- 

 tree shed its pointed, needle-like leaves in the Silesian forests, and 

 there they were left to decay and turn into mold at their leisure, 

 until M. Pannewitz started a manufactory for converting them into 

 forest-wool, which, besides being eflicacious in cases of rheumatism 

 when applied in its woolly state, can also be curled, felted, or woven. 

 Mixed with cotton, it has even been used for blankets and wearing 

 apparel. The ethereal oil evolved during the preparation of the wool 



