304 AUSTRALIAN NATIVE PLANTS. 
prise will probably be entirely abandoned, or confined to extremely 
favourable localities.* 
“‘ Messrs. Borrow and Haycroft have established at Echunga, 
South Australia, a manufactory of /annage, which must be of great 
interest to all colonists, and from the methods employed is almost 
pharmaceutical. About 10,000 tons of Wattle Bark are sent annually 
from South Australia alone, and it is calculated that the waste in 
stripping is about four times this amount. The new factory con- 
verts the branches too small to pay for stripping into a strong fluid 
extract called saznage, which contains water 60 per cent., and 
soluble tanning 38.2 per cent., according to an analysis by 
Mr. G. H. Hodgson of samples from the first 80 tons recently 
shipped to England. The Wattle /rash yields 12 to 16 per cent. of 
tannage; two men can often cut and load five tons, and the waggons 
can bring in two loads a day, equal to five or six tons; and at the 
price (£1 a ton) which the firm is paying for thinnings, and tops, 
and branches, so much is offering that the patentees are obliged to 
distribute their order. The /rash is tied up in large bundles and 
carted into the factory. It is there weighed, close beside the 
machine which cuts it up into chaff. This machine is very much 
like an ordinary steam-plane, the chisels revolving at a high speed, 
and cutting through 23-inch saplings quite readily. The chips are 
shovelled into large wooden hoppers, into which steam is intro- 
duced from a large Cornish boiler. There are three steam-heated 
vats, and the liquor is transferred from one to the other, pumped 
into elevated tanks, and thence allowed to flow from a tap on to 
steam-heated evaporating pans about thirty or forty feet in length. 
The evaporation is so rapid that in traversing the pans from the one 
end to the other the liquid is converted into a thick, tenacious, 
treacly extract. At the end of the pans it flows into a cistern, and 
thence by a kind of treacle-gate into the casks, each of which will 
hold about rocwt. All that now remains to be done is paste on 
a label, put in a bung, weigh the cask, and send it off to market_ 
In the process of evaporation a certain portion of the tannic acid 
* See also a paper “On the Export and Consumption of Wattle Bark, and the Process 
of Tanning,” by James Mitchell (Proc. R.S. Yan Diemen’s Land, 1851). The subject of 
Extracts is here dealt with. 
