198 JOURNAL, r.a.s. (ceylon). [Vol. IX. 



found in particles of greater or lesser size diffused through 

 the including rock, whence it has to be separated by careful 

 and costly processes of breaking, picking, washing, drying, 

 sifting, and sorting. The wet process applied to plumbago 

 means that rock impregnated with the ore is pounded and 

 put into water, when the low specific gravity of the 

 graphite (only twice the weight of water) causes it to float. 

 Graphite, as already noticed, has been found in a large 

 number of places in India, but always in too close inter- 

 mixture with the siliceous, ferruginous, or other constituents 

 of the rocks to be economically valuable. 



The Canadian and United States plumbago is of as pure a 

 quality as that of Ceylon, but good as the American ore is, 

 when freed from the rock in which it is generally scattered 

 after the fashion of mica, I suspect the high cost of the 

 labour necessary for first mining and then separating the 

 mineral by the wet process — for the dry has proved a failure 

 — will prevent continued and successful competition with 

 Ceylon. We shall soon see, however, for The Joseph Dixon 

 Crucible Company had produced in 1882 a quarter of a 

 million pounds of native plumbago, against 16,000,000 

 pounds imported from Ceylon, and a determination to " go 

 ahead" was expressed. Some as yet unthought of machinery, 

 cheap chemicals, and appliances must, however, be brought 

 into play before the pure, massive Ceylon product and 

 our far cheaper labour are distanced in the race. And if, as 

 Professor Dawson states, some of the Canadian ore is 

 fibrous enough to indicate by its texture its vegetable origin, 

 there is room to suspect that, however pure the mineral 

 may be as carbon, its mechanical condition cannot be so good 

 as that of the more highly crystallized Ceylon plumbago. 

 One important element in the question is, that according 

 to our American friends themselves, enterprise and compe- 

 tition have had such influence, that Ceylon plumbago can 

 now be obtained by them at 25 per cent, of what it cost 

 some years ago. 



The effect of competing demand for the substance, however, 

 between 1850 and 1870, chiefly on the part of the Battersea 

 Crucible Company in England and The Joseph Dixon Com- 

 pany in the United States, was to enhance the value of the 



