AND OTHER BIRDS 117 



of beard, I saw a section of my face in this 

 remaining portion of mirror. I never dared to 

 look again; I seemed to have broken out into 

 a loathsome rash of small type, that might have 

 been, for all I could tell, infectious. Assuredly 

 I never should have been at large at all. I was 

 a danger to the community, a reproach to the 

 perspicuity of the police.* 



*It was during this expedition that the inner and more esoteric 

 meaning of washing up was revealed to me, the philosophy of the 

 process. We used to do it turn and turn about and often have i 

 paused to ponder how dirty plates, mugs, knives and forks became 

 clean when washed together in a small tin dish. 



It seemed so impossible that by putting soap into hot water the 

 leavings of a meal should disappear, that bacon fat, marmalade, 

 cheese, crumbs, yolk of egg, butter, mustard, tea, sugar, and coffeo 

 dregs, mixed in the same brew, should give us the finished product 

 of clean plates, clean knives, clean forks and clean mugs. Lying 

 awake at night I used to worry over it, and begun to find myself 

 unable to think of birds for more than twelve or fourteen consecu- 

 tive hours. 



One evening, after we had finished an extra mixed meal, for each 

 of the three of us had his specialty, I asked quite suddenly, "How 

 is it that our washings up make the things clean?" 



I shall never forget the answer. "Guthrie-Smith," was the 

 reply, "from the time I was a wee toddling laddie in kilts I 

 determined to work that out, and please God I have." And then I 

 was told everything. 



It appears that all food stuffs contain superphosphates in varying 

 quantities. There is superphosphate, for instance, in butter, 3.77, 

 superphosphate in marmalade 1.32, in ordinary sugar 1.86 (a frac- 

 tion less in colonial refined), superphosphate in bacon, cheese, yolk 

 of egg, and so forth. 



All soaps, on the other hand, contain hyperphosphates, but most 

 markedly the common bar soap used throughout the Dominion in 

 washing up. Now it is the nature of phosphates at certain tem- 

 peratures to fuse. 



Then he continued, "When after the plates and knives and 

 mugs are in hot water and the soap impaled on a fork is swished 

 around the basin you may have noticed that quantities of bubbles 

 arise? Well, these bubbles are the gases evolved by the union of 

 the superphosphates and the hyperphosphates, and as they burst, 

 the leavings of the meal, the bacon fat, crumbs, dregs of coffee! 

 etc., pass by a simple chemical process into the air we breatie and 

 once again become hydrogen and oxygen." 



I had never known that before. In my school days science was 

 hardly taught. It w r as an extra. 



