484 THE AMERICAN WOOD-PAPER COMPANY. 
dreadful, tearing hooks, have done their mission, and the pretentions 
tree, no longer known to the village, carries my humble message. 
Thrice-honoured tree, with all its sad experience, if it be the means of 
sending the newspaper to its million readers, so cheap, and clear, and 
bright, that the poorest labourer in the land may always- be enabled to 
welcome it to his humble home. 
The following description, from the ' American Artizan' of New 
York, gives some further specific details of the manufacture : — 
The process by which the wood, after being cut into chips, is reduced 
to pulp, and the apparatus employed in the reduction, are the subjects of 
the several patents of Charles Watt and Hugh Burgess, Morris L. Keen, 
and C. S. Buchanan. The process consists in boiling the wood chips in 
a strong solution of caustic alkali, under pressure in closed boilers, 
from which the pulp is discharged into expanding chambers, in which 
it is partly drained, and whence it is afterwards discharged into waggons, 
in which it is further drained before being taken to the bleachery, the 
discharge from the boilers and expanding-tanks being effected by the 
pressure of the steam above it. The pulp, when discharged into the 
waggons, is of a dark grayish-brown colour, but after having been 
drained begins to show some promise of eventually assuming the white 
colour it has after the bleaching process. Some idea may be formed of 
the immense scale on which the.process is carried on when we state, that 
the ten boilers with the expanding-tanks and receiving-waggons fill a 
building 132 feet long and 75 feet wide. The waggons, while receiving 
the pulp, are arranged upon turn-tables, from which they are run off on 
a railway running the whole length of the building. 
It may appear to the uninitiated that the expense of the enormous con- 
sumption of alkali involved in this process would be fatal to its commercial 
success, but fortunately no less than eighty-five per cent, of the alkali is 
recovered after every boiling, to be used over again with fifteen per cent, 
of fresh alkali for the repetition of the process upon a new supply of wood. 
To recover the alkali, the liquor drained from the pulp is collected in drains 
under the floor of the boiling-house, and thence conducted by under- 
ground pipes to the evaporating-house, where it flows through evaporat- 
ing furnaces, subject to heat both below and above. The water having 
been evaporated in these furnaces, the recovered alkali is collected to 
be re-dissolved with the fresh alkali in immense tanks in a building 
called the mixing-house. In these tanks the dissolution and mixing 
are expedited by revolving stirrers within the tanks. The evaporating- 
house is a large circular building, 200 feet in diameter, resembling the 
locomotive sheds at some of the largest railway depots. The trains of 
furnaces radiate from the centre of the building, and all communicate 
with one central chimney. 
The wood best suited for the manufacture of pulp is of the kinds 
which are plentiful and the least valuable for other purposes — poplar, 
