REFUSE 



THE UTILIZATION OF WASTE MATERIALS 



BY 



M. W. COLCHESTER-WEMYSS, PRESIDENT 



READ TO THE COTTESWOLD CLUB, NOVEMBER 21st, 1893 



I have always thought that one of the most beautiful 

 revelations of science is the absolute indestructibility of 

 matter. Do with any material what you will, it is im- 

 possible to obliterate its constituent elements. Burn it, 

 dissolve it in water or acids, reduce it to powder and 

 scatter it to the winds ; the sum total of its atoms remains 

 precisely the same as before, though they may have 

 entered into new and entirely different combinations, and 

 may have assumed fresh and altered forms. It therefore 

 follows that Nature herself recognizes no such thing as 

 waste. Some of her gifts may at times be poured forth 

 in apparently lavish and wasteful profusion, but the 

 surplus is either stored up for use in the ordinary course 

 of the world's change, or by decaying and assuming new 

 forms is again rendered available for immediate service. 



As an illustration of my meaning, may I ask you to 

 follow back with me the genealogy of that illuminating 

 medium, to which we are indebted for so much of the 

 artificial light we enjoy. Coal gas is a mixture of various 

 chemical combinations of five of the elements. It is 

 extracted, as is well known to all, by certam mechanical 

 operations from coal. Now coal owes its origin to vast 

 growths and accretions of vegetable matter in far-away pre- 

 hi.storic times, when the surface of this hemisphere was 



