Appendix D 



Excerpt from Thomas Cooper, A practical treatise on dyeing and callicoe 

 printing. Philadelphia: Thomas Dobson, 1815, pp. 483-506. 



APPENDIX. 



On the Colours produced on Woollen, by mmns of various plants. From D'Ambourney, of Rouen. 



This gentleman instituted a set of experiments to ascertain what permanent colours 

 could be produced by means of plants, chiefly those in common use, and easily procured. 

 They appear to be made with considerable care, and were deemed of such importance 

 as to be published by order of the French government, under the administrationship of 

 M. Calonne, in 1786. 



I have already intimated my opinion, that a few drugs in common use and well 

 known, whether of foreign or domestic growth, would better answer the purpose of a 

 dyer, than a multiplicity of dye stuffs whose virtues were not ascertained with equal 

 precision, and which produced no better effect at the same price than the drugs in use. 

 The more chemical knowledge extends, the more will the Materia Tinctoria, like the 

 Materia Medica, be reduced in number and in price. 



But these observations ought not to extend to the experiments of the laboratory, the 

 true source of future improvement in the art of dyeing. The experiments and perseverance 

 of Dr. Bancroft has sent into every dye house, and every printing shop in Europe, without 

 any exception, an article so common in the American woods, that it was never noticed 

 here, though a chemist could hardly pass by a tanner's establishment without being 

 struck with the colour of the skins. I mean the quercitron, or bark of the common 

 American black oak. This drug has nearly superseded weld and fustic, both in the 

 woollen and the cotton dye ; in so much, that I may venture to say, not one-fiftieth part 

 of those drugs are now used in England, France, and Germany, that were used thirty 

 years ago. 



The experiments of D'Ambourney on the birch, the Lombardy poplar, and the black 

 alder in particular ; the use of walnut peel, and of soot on the continent of Europe, so 

 little employed in England and this country, promise improvements in dyeing by means 

 of common and cheap articles, by no means to be slighted or overlooked. 



Homassel, or Bouillon Le Grange for him, have republished the kind of abridgment of 

 D'Ambourney's experiments, which D'Ambourney himself inserted at the end of his 

 book: this presents a general idea only of what vegetables may be employed in dyeing, 

 but does not afford information sufficiently accurate for a dyer to follow at once. I shall 

 republish this abridgment with the English names of the plants, not so much for the use 

 of the dyer as of the experimentalist; and to open a door to a kind of knowledge, which 



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