COMMERCIAL NOTES AND SCIENTIFIC INFORMATION. 97 
wood turpentine distilleries with costly plant, and to exploit them successfully. After- 
wards, when owing to interference by the Government an end was put to the excessive 
speculation, a reaction set in, and numerous wood turpentine distilleries were financially 
ruined. 
For some time, owing to the high prices of turpentine oil, a great many more 
pine trees were tapped than formerly, with the result that later on over-production of 
turpentine oil made itself felt. 
The authors give detailed particulars of the various methods of manufacturing 
wood turpentine. They enumerate the steam process, the solvent process, the alkali 
process, the bath process and the distillation process. 
In the steam process the wood, after being broken up, is distilled by steam under 
pressure until only little oil passes over. This process is profitable only when turpentine 
oil prices are high. 
The solvent process, in which the wood is treated either before or after distillation 
by steam with a volatile solvent has the drawback that too large a proportion of the 
extracting-agent is lost. 
The alkali process is protected by numerous patents. It is applied where the wood 
is made into paper, and where the wood turpentine products are recovered only as 
by-products. This process requires somewhat expensive apparatus. 
In the bath process the wood is heated in retorts fitted with double jackets within 
which the high-boiling turpentine products, heated to a high temperature, circulate. 
The wood turpentine obtained by this process is of good quality, although not so 
good as the product prepared by the steam process. The great waste of fuel, pre- 
sumably owning to the formation of highly-volatile decomposition-products, makes the 
process little profitable. 
The distillation process is based upon the dry distillation of the wood, and appears 
to have the best financial prospects. The authors distinguish three varieties of this 
process, which it would lead us too far to discuss, in particular because we have 
already repeatedly dealt with the manufacture of wood turpentine’). 
In continuation of a paper published by him some years ago”), O. Aschan®) has 
examined the first runnings of a Finnish pine-tar oil. He used as his raw material a 
substance which had been distilled from the crude pine-tar oil by steam, without the 
addition of lime, in the year 1906. At the time this product had djs. 0,8720, but in 
1912 it had di;. 0,8965, an increase which indicated very considerable condensation of 
the unsaturated constituents. 
Aschan states that this material, in addition to acetone, contained the following 
constituents: furane, sylvane, acetaldehyde and propionic aldehyde. 
In the same paper Aschan refers to the theory of wood-distillation. He suspects 
that the bodies which are present in the first runnings of pine-tar oil are not generated 
from the resins and terpenes but from the ordinary wood-substances. For particulars 
of his detailed explanations we must refer to the original. 
| Vetiver Oil. Excellent material for distilling has again been available, and we 
have therefore no longer to fear the competition of the cheaper Réunion oil. The 
1) Comp. Report October 1907, 94; November 1908, 125; October 1909, 119; April 1910, 118; April 1912, 126; 
October 1912, 110; April 1913, 105. — %) Zeitschr. f. angew. Chem. 20 (1907), 1811; Report April 1908, 105. — 
*) Zeitschr. f. angew. Chem. 26 (1913), 1, 709. 
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