274 Cellulose 



purposes after being manufactured, involve the special chemistry 

 of the raw materials at every turn. It must be confessed that 

 the arts of spinning, weaving, bleaching, and dyeing have been 

 highly developed upon a very slender chemical foundation so 

 far as regards the raw materials themselves. There is no doubt, 

 on the other hand, that an ample field for technological develop- 

 ments will be opened up by the systematic application of the 

 more definite chemical knowledge now available. It may in 

 fact be affirmed as a general principle, established also by long 

 and invariable experience, that there are no results of chemical 

 investigation, however recondite they may appear, which are not 

 in their due order absorbed into the province of technology. 

 As it is the province of the technologist to give a complete 

 account of his processes in terms of the factors which contri- 

 bute to the result, it will be very evident, from the ensuing 

 discussion of cellulose technology, that much remains to be 

 done before the industries of fibre-preparing, spinning and 

 paper-making, bleaching, printing and dyeing, can be said to 

 rest on such a basis. 



Preparation of Fibres from Fibrous Raw Materials. 

 Processes with this object divide themselves into two groups : 

 (a) for the separation of spinning fibres, (b) of paper-making 

 fibres. While the latter are almost exclusively chemical, the 

 former are as exclusively mechanical, and require therefore but 

 a brief general notice, (a) The spinning fibres are mostly 

 obtained from annual growths. With the exception of cotton, 

 which is a seed-hair, they form part of complex structures, and 

 are themselves either localised into a special tissue (bast fibres, 

 see Appendix, figs. 1-4), or scattered more or less irregularly 

 (ribro- vascular bundles of monocotyledons, see figs. 5, 6). 

 Structurally they are differentiated, as fibres or elongated cells, 

 from the cellular tissue by which they are surrounded, the com- 

 ponent cells of which are spherical or cubical, with more or less 



