222 PROCEEDINGS OF THE COTTESWOLD CLUB 



slaughter houses ; greasy skimmings off the Seine ; they 

 remove the waste and pickings of vegetables from the 

 Hospitals, and they buy up the old grease which has 

 served for lubricating the axles of carriage wheels. The 

 vegetable pickings are boiled and used for pig feeding, 

 3000 fat pigs being annually sold. They make oils, soap, 

 and stearine, and the residues, hquid and solid are 

 converted into manures. 



Rats are considered by some to be a very objectionable 

 product of the animal world, but they are turned to many 

 useful purposes. The thumbs of most kid gloves are 

 made of rat skin, it being more elastic yet tougher than 

 kid. The fur of the rat is much used hy hatters ; and 

 there was an individual at Liskeard, in Cornwall, not long 

 since who clad himself from head to foot in rat skins, 

 using for the purpose the skins of 670 rats. In China 

 rat-tail soup is considered equal to mock turtle, and 

 indeed we eat the flesh of the pig, one of the dirtiest- 

 feeding creatures of the whole creation, and why should 

 not the flesh of a good fat corn-fed rat be palatable and 

 good meat. I beheve they sold for fabulous prices 

 during the siege of Paris, and were much esteemed by 

 connoisseurs. 



Among various waste substances which have long been 

 unutilized and of no value is scrap-leather. The quantity 

 of hides and leather annually used in the United Kingdom 

 amounts to over 70,000 tons. Some small proportion of 

 leather parings and clippings are used in cementing iron 

 cutting tools ; some few more are worked up in the 

 manufacture of Ferrocyanide of Potassium; in some 

 places they are even allowed to accumulate, and are then 

 burnt simply to economize fuel in warming the pipes. 

 Many patents have been taken out for attacking these 

 scraps and old leather with chemicals and special 

 machinery, and reducing it to a pulpy mass, and then 

 reconverting it into a species of artificial leather. 



