328 MAUVE AND MAGENTA. 



dyed surface has a power peculiarly its own, of separating two or more rays 

 from the source of all colour, light, and of sending them off in most har- 

 monious combination. The philosophy of colour may eventually engage 

 our attention, when the causes producing the much-admired tones of the 

 Mauve and Magenta can be elucidated more satisfactorily than we can do 

 now ; at present, we are limited to a clear but concise description of the 

 processes by which we have obtained the dyes whose names are taken 

 for the heading of our article. 



A piece of wood and a lump of coal have no particular resemblance to 

 each other, but they belong to the same family ; they are very near rela- 

 tions. The coal we burn, and which is dug from a thousand feet below 

 the present surface of the earth, with most laborious toil and under cir- 

 cumstances of peculiar hazard to the miner, was once a forest growing in 

 luxuriant beauty, in the splendour of a tropical sun. Myriads of ages have 

 elapsed, mountains have been worn down, and their debris strown over the 

 buried forests. Hundreds of yards in thickness of sandstone and shale 

 have to be pierced ere we reach our buried treasure, more valuable far than 

 the " hoarded gold " of the enchanter Merlyn. In the deeps, and in the 

 darkness of these rock formations, chemical changes have gone on, resulting 

 in the production of that coal which gives to our country her commercial 

 supremacy, and to our ladies — Mauve and Magenta. 



We have to take our coal to the gasworks, and there we subject this 

 natural product to a destructive distillation — as the process is termed ; we 

 obtain the gas with which we illuminate our towns and our houses, and 

 the coal yields by the process, at the same time, many other things. 



The simplest illustration of gas-making may be obtained by taking a 

 common tobacco-pipe, filling the bowl thereof with powdered coal, and 

 covering it with a piece of clay. If we place the bowl of the pipe inverted 

 in the fire, we shall find, as it becomes red-hot, that, first, a liquid will 

 distil over through the stem — this is the fluid product — and as the heat is 

 increased we have a gaseous body, which will take fire, and burn steadily, 

 on the application of flame. Precisely the same process goes on in our 

 tobacco-pipe as occurs in the open fire, with one very important exception 

 — the products are not allowed to combine with the oxygen of the air. By 

 heat we decompose the coal : the elements thus separated re-combine among 

 themselves ; and thus it has been proved that we can obtain — 



Seven solid products ; nine gaseous compounds ; six acid substances ; 

 eleven bases, or compounds capable of uniting with acids ; and no less than 

 fourteen neutral bodies, many of them of a very remarkable character. 



Coal is, chemically, a compound of carbon with hydrogen, oxygen, and 

 nitrogen ; and it is by the interchange of these four elementary bodies, in 

 varying proportions, that the forty-seven bodies are obtained. 



Among the eleven bases is a substance named Aniline; and as from this 

 body all the colours of which we have to speak are procured, it merits an 

 especial description. 



Formerly, at our gasworks, everything was regarded as a waste product 



