720 7'l?AXSACTI0.\S OF THE AMERICAy lySTITCTE. 



feed on them. But where a farmer has some tons of bones, and lives 

 near a railroad, none of these experiments are to be recommended. lie 

 will find his advantage in shipping to some grinder, who has facilities 

 for handling and working np bones to the best advantage. For instance, 

 the Lister Brothers, of Newark, N. J., the largest bone dealers in the 

 country, will give from twenty-five dollars to thirty dollar a ton, and 

 sell the farmer crushed bones at thirty-five dollars. Farmers hear 

 much of crushed bone in various degrees of fineness, and find that 

 much more is charged for bone-flour and floated bone than for crushed 

 bone. In what does the difl'erence consist? A walk through the 

 establishment of the Lister Brothers, enables us to answ^er this subject 

 intelligently. Miscellaneous bones are brought into such a mill from 

 all parts of the world. Here is a reeking mess of sheep-heads, and 

 other bony offal from the butchers. Here is a pile of ox-bones from 

 South America ; the flesh w^as boiled from them in making Liebig's 

 extract of meat.. In this shed are skulls ; here is a stall of hoofs and 

 horns ; yonder in bogheads are the hard hollow bones of oxen, twelvp 

 from each animal, the porous end or knuckles cut of by a circular 

 saw, and the middle parts sold to the button and brush-makers at 

 eighty dollars or ninety dollars a ton. A general sorting is made when 

 the bone comes in. Then such as are covered with some flesh and 

 cartilage are thrown into large tanks and boiled till the oil rises to the 

 surface and is drawn off. In handling thirty tons of bones per day, 

 about fifteen barrels of soap-grease is obtained. The bones, warm 

 from the tank, are then handled on a rough table by a gang of rough 

 red-armed women, who could not find wo^'k more distasteful, but it 

 pays them $1.50 a day if they are spry. In this handling, the strings 

 of boiled meat are taken off and thrown in a pile, and the bones are 

 sorted in three general grades, the hardest and whitest go to manu- 

 facturers, those somewhat compact go to the retorts where they are 

 converted into bone-black or animal charcoal used by sugar-refiners, 

 while the skulls, ribs, and small bones and knuckles go the bone-mill. 

 The flesh is taken' to a drying-house or oven, and there dried and 

 half-baked ; it is then piled up with nitrate of soda and sulphuric 

 acid, the slag that comes from retorts in which sulphuric acid is made. 

 This arrests deca}^ and fixes the ammonia in the flesh so it will not 

 escape in the air, but not so the plant cannot take it up. 



The dried composted flesh is mixed with the bones in grinding : 

 about one-fourth of the mass, of bone flour consists of this dried and 

 pulverized meat. The first set of teeth working sonietliing like a 



