78 THE STORY-BOOK OF SCIENCE 



triturate them in water, and convert them into a sort 

 of soup. The pulp is gray, it must be whitened. 

 Then recourse is had to powerful drugs, which at- 

 tack everything they touch, and in less than no time 

 make it white as snow. Behold the pulpy mass thor- 

 oughly purified. Other machines spread it in thin 

 layers on sieves. Water drips through, and the rag 

 soup forms into felt. Cylinders press this felt, oth- 

 ers dry it, others give it a polish. The paper is 

 finished. 



''Before it became paper, the first material was 

 rags, or cloth too tattered to use. How many uses 

 has not this cloth served, and what energetic treat- 

 ments has it not undergone before being cast out as 

 rubbish! Washing with corrosive ashes, contact 

 with acrid soap, pounding with a beetle, exposure to 

 the sun, air, and rain. What is then this material 

 which, in spite of its delicacy, resists the brutalities 

 of washing, soap, sun, and air ; which remains intact 

 in the bosom of rottenness; which braves the ma- 

 chines and drugs of paper-making, and always comes 

 out of these ordeals more supple and whiter, to be- 

 come at last a sheet of paper, beautiful satiny paper, 

 the confidant of our thoughts? You know now, my 

 little friends, this admirable material, source of so 

 much intellectual progress, comes to us from the 

 flock of the cotton plant and the bark of hemp and 

 flax." 



"I am certainly going to surprise Claire," said 

 Jules, "when I tell her that her beautiful prayer- 

 book with the silver clasp was made from horrid 

 rags, perhaps from ragged handkerchiefs thrown 



