Nov. 1, 1864.1 THE TECHNOLOGIST. 



ON CHEMISTRY APPLIED TO THE ARTS, 165 



necessity of this has been so fully admitted that a conditioning house has 

 existed for forty or fifty years in Lyons, and its advantages have been 

 so fully appreciated that similar establishments have arisen and are well 

 supported in every town on the Continent, where dealings in silk to any 

 amount take place. I may mention, as an instance of the universal 

 adoption of the practice, that even in Crefeld the finest building in the 

 town is the conditioning house. The result is, that on the Continent the 

 intervention of the conditioning house between buyer and Beller has 

 become quite a matter of course, with the happy result of abolishing a 

 class of dishonourable dealing which is eating like a canker into the 

 silk trade of Great Britain. I cannot understand why the attempts 

 made to introduce this admirable system into our country have hitherto 

 met with so little success, and can only infer that there is an unsoundness 

 in the trade, which places many of the silk manufacturers to a great 

 extent under the control of wealthy merchants, who, it appears, are the 

 chief opponents of conditioning. Otherwise one would suppose that its 

 advantages to all engaged in working up this valuable product are too 

 obvious to require demonstration, for, taking the most moderate view of 

 the matter, the average gain to the manufacturer by conditioning will be 

 not less than five per cent., and this loss (if he does not condition) 

 cannot be recovered in any subsequent stage, so that his foreign com- 

 petitor has in this respect alone, an advantage over him of at least five 

 per cent. I may state in a few words how conditioning is carried on. 

 Silk being an exceedingly hygrometric substance — its moisture varying 

 constantly with the amount of humidity and the temperature of the 

 atmosphere — the first operation is to ascertain the total amount of water 

 it contains, for which purpose samples, carefully selected from the bale 

 when it reaches the conditioning house, are weighed in delicate scales, 

 dried in hot-air stoves, and reweighed, the excess of moisture (beyond the 

 10 per cent, admitted to be the average normal quantity) being then 

 easily calculated. The second operation carried out in the conditioning 

 house is that of boiling off the samples dried as above, and again drying 

 and reweighing, to ascertain the quantity of soap, oil, sugar, acetate of 

 lead, &c, added to give weight, and the result of this operation is to 

 show a loss of 30, 35, and even 40 per cent, instead of about 21 per cent., 

 which is the average amount of natural gum. 



