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an exhaustive description of the El Dorado which for so long 
lay hidden in coal tar, and the doors of which were thrown open 
by the chemist’s magic wand. Ina similar manner the lecturer 
dealt with ammoniacal liquor, and then passed on to consider 
house refuse, a form of waste with which all are more or less 
familiar. This includes rags, bones, old boots, ashes, waste- 
paper, kitchen grease, tin cans, etc. The collection and mani- 
pulation of such a heterogeneous mixture of apparently hopeless 
rubbish does not seem very promising, but it is in reality a 
very profitable business, and employs many thousands of men 
and women. The rags are turned into paper, shoddy felting, 
drugget, manure, prussic acid, Prussian blue; the bones are 
metamorphosed into margarine, candles, soap, railway grease, 
glue, size, buttons, knife-handles, charcoal for filters, sugar 
refining, and blacking making; phosphorus used in the 
manufacture of matches; and chemical manures. The tin 
cans reappear in our households in a hundred varieties of 
children’s tin toys, having in the meantime been deprived of 
the solder which held their parts together. The rag-pickers, 
or Chiffoniers of Paris find a source of considerable income in 
fruit and sardine cans alone. Some of them have even con- 
structed their houses with sardine tins, filling them with mud, 
piling them together two or three deep, and using clay as 
mortar. Broken crockery seems the most hopeless of all forms 
of waste, but there exists a company whose sole business it is 
to extract the gold from the better kinds of broken pots. 
Gold refiners find the waste from their annual spring-cleaning 
a most valuable item ; all the floors are thoroughly cleansed, 
chimneys swept, all pipes and tanks scrubbed out and the refuse 
obtained is refined. At one refinery £600 has been realised from 
the soot of the chimney alone, while it is stated that the sweep- 
ings of the Royal Mint for the year 1900 was worth over £2,100, 
The lecturer concluded a remarkably full paper in the following 
words: “‘ It has almost passed into a proverb that he who makes 
two blades of grass grow where only one grew before is a benefactor 
of his fellows. The chemists of this and the past two genera- 
tions have made it their work to examine the composition of 
every kind of matter known to them, to discover the properties 
of each, and their action upon each other, and by their long and 
exhaustive researches have succeeded in building up numerous 
artificial compounds. By their efforts and skill waste matters 
have been transformed into useful and valuable products, new 
industries have consequently sprung into existence, giving a 
means of earning a livelihood to thousands of persons. How 
much then does the chemist, who has been the principal agent 
in attaining all this, deserve the regard of his fellows ? If the 
