76 HOLLAND: MICA DEPOSITS OF INDIA. 



In India it is used largely at native festivals, like the Mahommedan 

 maharam, and at weddings, for processional ornaments as lamps and 

 tinsel decorations on banners, taziahs and umbrellas. The powder 

 is sprinkled on clothes, fans, wall-paper, toys and pottery, to produce 

 a pleasing sparkle. Considerable quantities are used in sheet form for 

 painting on in various parts of India, and pictures so painted for screen- 

 making are obtainable in most large bazars. A surprisingly large quan- 

 tity of mica is used in India for these purposes and the industry is by no 

 means new, for some of the mines have been worked for hundreds of 

 years. 



Mica has been tried, it is said, with favourable results as a ferti- 

 lizer ; but any virtues it possesses in this respect are probably due 

 merely to its mechanical action on the soil, for it undergoes decomposi- 

 tion too slowly to affect the supply of available plant-food. Another use 

 for the waste material has been tried by Mr. J. L. Spoor, of Messrs. 

 Arbuthnot & Co., Madras, who about three years ago made some very 

 satisfactory fire-bricks out of compressed mica-waste. 



Finally, the native physician makes considerable use of mica in 

 India for the preparation, in accordance with absurdly elaborate and 

 intricate processes, of medicines for most diseases. An account of the 

 principal use of the mineral in medical preparations is given in 

 U. C. Dutt's Materia Medica of the Hindus, whilst Raja Sir Sourindro 

 Mohan Tagore has enumerated a list of 224 medicines in which prepared 

 mica is an essential constituent, and the same distinguished pandit 

 has given a corresponding list of the diseases for which the medicines 

 are supposed to be efficacious. One example in practical Hindu 

 Materia Medica will be sufficient to show that the process of 

 preparation is considered to be important. After an elaborate 

 process for the preparation of dhanyabhra, or mica flour, Sir 

 Sourindro Mohan Tagore gives the details of one amongst the several 

 methods for its preparation for use in Hindu pharmacy as follows : — 



" Pound talc with the following: — milk of the cow, the she-buffalo, and the 



she-goat; gangapatra; man's urine; the offshoots of the vata tree; and the 



blood of the goat. Sublime a hundred times, when the talc, on being calcined, 



will assume the red colour of the ruby, Talc thus calcined when taken internally. 



( 66 ) 



