48 A'ANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 



becomes more acute; if they lodge in the respiratory muscles, breathing will be 

 affected. Feebleness and exhaustion duly set in, and after six or eight weeks of 

 suffering, the patient succumbs. In every country the trichina disease has pro- 

 duced victims. American pork is largely blamed as the chief cause, so that Italy, 

 etc., refuses to admit importations of that meat. Prussia has a battalion of 18,000 

 inspectors to examine the pork, and despite that sanitary army they cannot pre- 

 vent diseased meat from passing the frontier into France. At the abattoir here, 

 it takes an inspector with the microscope at least fifteen minutes to examine the 

 diaphragm — the most general seat of the disease — of a pig. It would require, 

 then, a large army to control the 23,000 tons of pork sold by 1,000 pork butch- 

 ers in Paris alone, the control being rendered more difficult where the meat has 

 been cut up or salted. As many as one trichinous American ham, in ten, has been 

 imported into Europe, and Messrs. Belfield and Attwood have discovered 13,000 of 

 the worms in a cubic inch of ham. It is a serious step to prohibit the importa- 

 tion of American pork into France, as it forms, by its cheapness, the basis of the 

 poor's animal diet. The law, however, holds pork butchers responsible for the 

 consequences of selling diseased meat. So it is proposed to instruct them in the 

 use of the microscope, as in Germany, to detect trichinae themselves. In the 

 meantime, the public is urged to give at least a good twenty minutes boiling to 

 every pound of pork in the pot. 



It is very commion to give to soap a name recalling the sap of the plant pre- 

 sumed to enter into its composition. Thus there are lettuce, marshmallow and 

 iris soaps, perfectly innocent of all connection with these plants. Lettuce is pre- 

 sumed to impart a green color to soap, though every one is aware its juice is- 

 white. The colorings of soap are intended merely to recall — by an appeal to the 

 eye — their perfumes. Thus, rose presumes roses; violet, violets; and yellow, 

 orange. It is aniline, whose raw material is coal tar, which supplies at present 

 industry with nearly all its coloring ingredients. Before being employed for the 

 preparation of soaps, the aniline dyes are first dissolved in glycerine. The juice 

 of lettuce, which is white, is extracted when the plant is coming into flow- 

 er, and is used, not for imparting a green hue to soap, but for preparing thri- 

 dace — from the Greek thridax, lettuce — and the active principle of that substance, 

 lactucarium, much used in medicine. It is sesquioxide of chrome that imparts 

 the various colors to soaps, to tissues, to porcelain, glass, paintings, etc. When 

 the oxide is combined with a certain quantity of water — known as in the hydrate 

 state — it produces the most permanent, beautiful and unalterable greens, which 

 are not poisonous like those from arsenic; it exists in the soap as an impalpa- 

 ble powder. Marshmallow soap is a combination of tallow and palm oil, but has not 

 a trace of marshmallow ; the same as bitter almonds soap is perfumed with nitro- 

 benzine — not extract of with almonds. The "economical " soaps generally con- 

 tain from 25 to 30 per cent, of earthy or primaceous matters. A good soap 

 ought not to contain much water, as an excess destroys the perfumes ; it ought to 

 be completely deprived of free alkali, so as not to affect the skin ; the alkali in 



