1-10 



[March 1907. 



FIBRES. 



PHILIPPINE FIBRES AND FIBROUS SUBSTANCES: 



Their Suitability fob Paper Making : Raw Matebials fob 



Paper Making. 



From the earliest Egyptian papyrus to the paper of to-day, the pre- 

 dominant characteristic of this material is that it consists of the enduring 

 portions of vegetable growth known as cellulose, although animal and mineral fibres 

 such as wool, silk, and abestos are occasionally employed. The art of modern 

 paper-making consists of uniting or felting together any fibrous material so as to form 

 a continous sheet. Linen or cotton rags are no longer exclusively employed ; indeed 

 these substances at present constitute but a small fraction of the raw material of the 

 paper-making industry. Any vegetable matter possessing sufficient fibrous structure 

 can be utilized.* Notwithstanding the great variety of available cheap materials, 

 rags of various kinds continued to form the chief substances for paper making both in 

 Europe and America, until the middle of the nineteenth century, at which time 

 they ceased to be obtainable in sufficient quantities to supply the demand and paper 

 makers began to search elsewhere for a cheaper and more inexhaustible material for 

 their rapidly growing industry. In 1851 wood-pulp was first used in the United 

 States, and three years later Mr. G. Thomas Routledge introduced esparto grass into 

 Englaud. The simultaneous introduction of wood and grass furnished the first impor. 

 tant sources of raw material for paper making and provided the first evidence that 

 perennial grasses are suitable for making stock. t 



It is interesting to note the direction which search for suitable paper material 

 was taking when the adaptability of wood for this purpose was first discovered and 

 also to predict the lines of future enquiry when woood no longer meets the demand. 

 When, in 1861, all import duties in Great Britain were repealed, the resulting 

 establishment of a vast number of weekly and daily papers and journals created so 

 great a demand for paper and paper pulp that manufacturers were forced to 

 supplement the imported Spanish and North African esparto grass with the cereal 

 straws, but even these proved insufficient to meet the requirements and, as the 

 prosperty of English paper mills appeared at a stake, the demand seemed justified 

 that the Indian bamboo forests be thrown open to private enterprise ; accordingly, 

 Mr. Thomas Routledge, a prominent paper manufacturer of Sutherland to whom 

 the introduction of esparto is due, sent investigators to India to study the problem 

 in that country. However, about this time the manufacture of paper stock from 

 spruce timber had been developed on the Continent, particularly in Germany and 

 Sweden, and supplies of this new material from those countries brought the much- 

 needed relief ; nevertheless, experiments were carried far enough to demonstrate 

 that bamboo fibre is much superior to spruce for paper stock and there seems but 

 little doubt that the bamboo-paper question will eventually be reopened. 



In America the evolution of raw material for paper making followed 

 somewhat different lines. The transition from rags to wood was direct and was later 

 followed by the use of straw in those regions far removed from spruce forests. No 

 recourse to perennial grasses or bamboo has thus been necessary. 



* In order to give some idea of the variety of materials from which paper can be and has bean 

 prepared, we may cite a book published in 1765 at Regensburg, Germany, by Jacob Schaeffer, the paper of 

 V/hich wae made from about sixty different sources, among wnich the following are curious and interesting 

 examples: Sawdust, hop vines, hornets' nests, pea straw, cabbage stumps, moss, and thistle stalks." 

 Thorpe ! Dictionary Applied Chemistry, 3,105. 



T As fibres and cotton flax in the form of cotton and linen rags have already undergone purification 

 and have been subjected to processes of manufacture, they can not, strictly speaking, be considered as raw 

 taaterialtJi 



