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POPULAR. SCIENCE REVIEW. 
WASTE PRODUCTS AND UNDEVELOPED SUBSTANCES. 
A T the present period, commerce is making such demands for 
increased supplies of various substances, that scientific men are 
carefully studying the residue of every manufacture, and the special 
qualities of each new product. At such a time, then, a book like the 
one before us is of peculiar value, and we have read with much pleasure 
and interest this work of Mr. P. L. Simmonds on Waste Products 
and Undeveloped Substances, a book aptly described by the author 
as affording “hints for enterprise in neglected fields,” — hints which 
do not refer so particularly to waste materials, but serve specially as 
directions by which to guide the student into new fields of inquiry as 
regards the utilitarian applications of natural productions generally. It 
would be difficult to define what is “waste” in the present day, so ad- 
mirably and completely are the- many substances, formerly neglected and 
thrown away, now utilized and converted into new and valuable products. 
A greater field, however, for the commercial as well as scientific inquirer 
is that afforded by undeveloped substances. It is now, when the word 
“ substitute ” is ringing like a battle-cry, that men’s thoughts are directed 
to every variety of produce ; and week after week vessels bring from 
different quarters of the globe woods, containing new tints for the dyer, or 
novel combinations of colour and figure for the cabinetmaker ; fibres of a 
special character ; seeds producing new descriptions of oils ; leaves, roots, 
&c., of unknown medicinal power. In fact, the world has revived once 
more the art of the alchemist, the attempt to transmute baser materials 
into more precious ones ; and no discovery ever made by the old chemists 
equalled or even approached the results which have been obtained from 
substances considered for ages as “ waste.” It is, however, only within 
the present century that we are seriously applying the example which 
nature has been teaching us ever since the first seed-time and harvest, and 
we have yet much to learn. There is no waste in nature ; decay is but a 
name for the life of new and often beautiful creations. Death begins life, 
as well as ends it, and no agencies in nature are suffered to waste. The 
changes which organic life undergoes are but the links leading from one 
organism to another, and in this transmutation there is no waste, no loss, 
but perfect harmony of arrangement, by which the life ending in death 
becomes the death merging into a new existence. 
We purpose considering the subject of Waste, and afterwards inquiring 
into Undeveloped substances. As refuse materials, Mr. Simmonds enume- 
rates a very interesting and lengthy list of articles, which, becoming waste, 
are by various manipulations changed into new and frequently very re- 
* Waste Products and Undeveloped Substances. By P. L. Simmonds. 
Hardwicke, 1862, 
