Photographic Notes. 5r 
Christiania, or Dantzig deal. They are much used in building, 
both for joists and for flooring, while of late years immense quan- 
tities have been brought over in a manufactured state as door and 
window frames or cheap furniture. The waste is used in Sweden 
for matches and for paper-pulp. The wood is durable when kept 
dry, as when the bark is left on, and its grain adapts it for carv- 
ing, polishing, or gilding. The resin, though less abundant than 
that of the pines, is of considerable value. It oozes as a fine 
yellow turpentine, known as “ spruce rosin” or “ frankincense,” 
from cracks in the bark or from artificial incisions, for as long as 
twenty years ; but eventually the wood is rendered valueless for 
timber, and even almost useless for fuel. By melting, boiling 
with water, and filtration, the medicinal Burgundy pitch is pre- 
pared from this resin in the Vosges Mountains, besides small 
quantities of colophony, lamp-black, and spirits of turpentine. In 
Norway the bark is used for tanning, though inferior to that of 
the larch; and in times of scarcity the sweetish bast is even 
ground down with meal as a bread-stuff. The roots also in the 
same country are split and boiled in a ley of wood ashes and sea- 
salt, which so loosens the fibres that they can be twisted into 
cordage, with which thin planks of the wood are tied together 
into extremely light and portable canoes. The young shoots, too, 
are used as winter fodder, or are spread, with those of the juniper, 
as were rushes in the England of the olden time, on the floors of 
churches and private houses ; whilst in all countries where the 
spruce grows, decoctions of these shoots in fermented liquor are 
used as a beverage or as a remedy for scurvy.—/vom “ Cassell’s 
familiar Trees” for January. 
Photographic Notes. 
To Recover Gold from Old Toning-Baths.—The Chemical 
News publishes the following method for recovering gold from old 
toning-baths :—Sulphurous acid, in solution, is added to the dis- 
solved gold, and the whole heated for half-an-hour ; at the end of 
that time, the gold is all precipitated, and can be filtered off at 
once—a rapidity which is not permissible by the ordinary means, 
as any one who is familiar with the process well knows. There is 
also avoided all trouble in getting rid of iron, as in precipitation 
with iron salts. 
