UPPER LEATHERS 79 



yield sour liquors. Gambier is easily the first favourite 

 amongst the tanning materials, whilst oak bark comes 

 second. It should be observed, however, that a hypo- 

 thetical tannage of equal weights of cube gambier and oak 

 bark is in reality a tannage by four-fifths gambier and one- 

 fifth oak bark, on account of the relatively greater strength 

 of the former. This observation is so apposite with respect 

 to some tannages that it is nearly correct to say that the 

 tannage is gambier and the oak bark an excuse for having 

 leaches through which the gambier liquors may be run 

 occasionally to clear and to sharpen slightly. No serious 

 theoretical objection to such a method is possible if the 

 liquors are weak and the system of working the liquors is 

 scientific and the process carefully regulated. Upper-leather 

 tannages, however, have scarcely merited scientific praise. 

 It is often a case, not of poor methods, but of no method at 

 all. The same lack of system, principle, and regularity 

 observed with regard to the limeyard has been equally 

 obvious in the tanyard, when perhaps the need was even 

 greater. Even a mellow tannage has varying degrees of 

 mellowness possible to it ; there still remains the question of 

 the soluble non-tans. However, method in the upper-leather 

 tanyard has often been conspicuously absent. There has 

 been many a factory where any one tan liquor was as good 

 as any other in the yard. In the writer's experience are 

 two such cases : in one the liquors were all 25 Bkr., in the 

 other they were all o Bkr. In such cases, handling the 

 goods from pit to pit is somewhat futile, and handling forward 

 from set to set still more so. Hence it is possible to find 

 dressing leather tanned by putting it slowly through one 

 round of handlers, adding a few buckets of gambier where 

 it apparently is necessary. It is, from one point of view, 

 surprising to see what serviceable and excellent-looking 

 upper leather can De manufactured by such happy-go- 

 lucky processes. It is, however, also possible to see how 

 this may occur. Gambier is a stable tan, and no souring 

 and little decomposition take place in gambier liquors. 

 It is also extremely mild and non-astringent, and is always 



