CLAY-LOADED PAPER AND SCIENTIFIC PUBLICATIONS. 87 



Clay-loaded Paper and Scientific Publications. 



By SKL^VYN IMAGE, M.A., F.E.S. 



Professor Poulton, in bis presidential address to the Entomological 

 Society of London, on January iHth last, made some strong remarks 

 upon the use of clay-loaded paper for scientific publications. The 

 Editor of The I'wcord has asked me to give him a note on the matter, 

 which I do not willingly only but delightedly. For many a day some 

 of us artists have been crying out against the use of these papers for 

 anything but the most ephemeral purposes. It is a great encourage- 

 ment that here at last is science joining art in her outcry. Perhaps 

 somebody now will begin to listen. 



Professor Poulton minces no words, and T cannot do better than 

 quote a few of them. " I refer especially," he says, " 'to the so-called 

 art papers.' Their opaque, white, polished surfaces, which yield the 

 most successful ' half-tone' and 'three-colour' printings, are at present 

 only possible by means of a veneer of china clay. Dust it is, and we, 

 are assured by experts that not many years wall pass before it succumbs 

 to the fate, which the highest authority tells us is in store for dust 

 .... Every Fellow of this Society will agree that an age producing 

 scientific records, which cannot be made to endure, is an age to be 

 rightly scorned by the generations of the future .... This is a 

 matter so important that it ought not to be left to the President of 

 your Society to sound the warning. It is a matter which it would 

 have been well if the Royal Society and the Ikitish Association had 

 taken up years ago .... I know no producer, scientific or other, 

 whose self-respect would sufier the employment of materials, however 

 good the effect, however low the cost, which would not last say five- 

 and -twenty years." 



Now five-and-twenty years is a time appallingly short. Professor 

 Poulton says that he is speaking on the authority of experts. From 

 one point of view I most ardently hope that his experts are accurate to 

 the letter. To any one who knows what the qualities of good paper 

 are, these loaded papers are hideous to the eye and unpleasant to the 

 touch ; so that, whether they will last or will not last, one would 

 rejoice to see them swept out of the land. If the Professor's time 

 limit is right, some of us will fortunately live to see them swept out of 

 it. But here I must be honest and confess that I, too, for the purposes 

 of this note, have been to an expert — one of the first in London — and 

 that I have come away from him not quite so jubilant as I had hoped. 

 No pressure of mine could bring my friend to assert that there was 

 evidence that these papers would in time drop to dust far a certaiiit!/. 

 But the chances that they would were, he was prepared to say, very 

 great. Well, and if at the moment we can see our way to going no 

 further than my cautious friend will go, is that not far enough '? Is 

 anybody, for serious work, not meant for the passing hour, content to 

 sit quiet and run such a risk ? 



But further. These loaded papers are forced upon us mainly in 

 support of half-tone blocks and the three-colour process. Half-tone 

 blocks, we are told, cannot be printed satisfactorily on any other than 

 loaded paper. Undoubtedly this is true. If anybody can invent a 

 good non-loaded paper upon which they can be printed, he may rely 

 upon a fortune in a week. lUit the'olnious answer is, why use half- 



