Nature and Ait, May 1, 1867.] 
ESPARTO AND ITS USES. 
137 
and destroys the congealing mass of produce. The 
manna collected from the bark by scraping, after 
having run in long tears down the trunk, is con- 
sidered very inferior to that caught in the fig-leaves, 
and is sold at a lower price. It has been supposed 
that during a peculiarly still state of the atmosphere 
the sweet exhalations from certain plants and trees 
may become again condensed and fall to the earth 
in the form of dew, and there are many phenomena 
connected with these honey-like showers extremely 
difficult to account for in any other way. 
Snakes, the larva of a large burrowing wood beetle, 
the iguana or fringed lizard, bats, and even a peculiar 
species of spider, are all made meat of. Earth is also 
at times eaten to allay the pangs of hunger, until 
good fortune reveals something more nutritious ; 
and bark has been found no bad material to fall 
back on when other bread-stuff has proved scarce. 
The hide from boots, shoes, and moccasins has, on 
many occasions, served to prolong the lives of ship- 
wrecked mariners and wandering hunters. Not- 
withstanding its splendour and wealth, the densely- 
crowded city is, after all, the region in which 
starvation in its greatest horror is more to be 
dreaded by the friendless outcast than in Nature’s 
own kingdom — the unreclaimed wilderness. 
ESPARTO AND ITS USES. 
( Gramen spartum, Plinii ; Stipa tenacissima, Linn.) 
O N no point is Nature so hardly pressed as in the 
pursuit of vegetable fibre. The race of Adam 
increases apace, and must have the wherewithal to 
be clothed. We read and write, muse and think, 
with increasing energy, and must have paper as a 
vehicle for our mental pabulum. So, in order to 
supply the wants of a civilization unparalleled in 
its extent and unsurpassed in the multiplicity of 
its necessities, Science and Art, Manufactures and 
Commerce, are allied as an army of attack on 
Nature’s varied and abundant products. But, 
although the quest be keen, and our knowledge of 
the uses of substances so extended as practically to 
obliterate the word “waste” from our vocabulary, 
the demand for vegetable fibre still waxes instead 
of wanes, and the earth, both in its wildernesses and 
cvdtivated places, is ransacked for something known, 
and, failing that, for something new. Men of science, 
skilled in the indicia of plants, naturalists hunting 
in untrodden solitudes, soldiers in cantonments in 
some out-of-the-way corner of the globe, traders and 
voyagers of every class, make up the army of, obser- 
vation. The field comprises the western and 
southern coasts of Africa, the subtropical regions of 
America, the islands of Polynesia and Australasia, 
and the whole of the lower portion of the vast 
Asiatic continent; but the conditions on which the 
great prize can alone be won are so complex that a 
new material fitted alike for fine textile and felting- 
purposes, practicable in respect of cost and supply, 
remains undiscovered. 
It must not be assumed, however, from the 
failure to secure a high-class fibre, answering in 
every respect to the requirements of modern manu- 
facturing science, that the diligence and labour 
bestowed in the search have been expended in vain. 
On the contrary, many useful sorts, as well as some 
of exceeding beauty, have been brought to light and 
utilized in a variety of ways, and when the protean 
shapes which fibre can be made to assume are con- 
sidered, it will be obvious that there is verge and 
room enough for all. For example, it enters 
largely into the composition of the elegant panels 
of our carriages, as well as of papier-mache in its 
varied artistic forms. It is moulded into cabinet- 
work, twisted and otherwise fancifully dealt with 
in the production of art ornaments for the drawing- 
room and boudoir. It is substituted for bones in 
cutlery, for hair and bristles in brushes, and so on, 
through every department of formative art. Some 
fibres there are which, from their abundance and 
peculiarity of structure, have been dedicated to 
particular uses ; such as jute, as a substitute for 
hemp in ropes, and in the manufacture of coarse 
north-country sacking ; but this is not where the 
shoe pinches. That which is so eagerly desired is 
a fibre capable of being easily cleaned, dressed, 
bleached, spun, and woven into the goods of 
Manchester and the stuffs of Bradford : something 
that shall come in aid of cotton and flax, shall dye 
well, and generally submit in a satisfactory manner 
to all the processes preliminary to its conversion 
into raiment. Nor would its mission end here ; 
for after having draped the dusky forms of the 
Egyptians and Syrians in blue, the Eastern Asiatics 
in white, the sable Yenuses of the Gold Coast 
in colours brilliantly incongruous, and made the 
ladies of the temperate zone “ beautiful for ever,” 
it must return, perchance in shreds, with the 
robustness of its early constitution mellowed by 
age, to be pounded and torn, recleaned, rebleached, 
fabricated into paper, and sent forth, again and 
again, as the servant of an intelligence as grand as 
it is inscrutable. 
Who has not heard of the lamentations of the 
paper-makers, whose wailings on the paucity of rags, 
and the total absence of fibre suited to their re- 
quirements, were followed by mortuary dirges on 
the decline and fall of their beautiful manufacture ; 
whilst, as a contemporaneous fact, there continued to 
bloom and die on the arid plains bordering the sunny 
Mediterranean, a perennial plant, containing within 
