186 
AMERICAN AGRICULTURIST. 
[Mat, 
ieon picture. By way of contrast, we give one (No. 451) 
which is quite ingenious, but the subject of it will bet¬ 
ter please the boys than it will the girls. 
-- «•-<—— - *—> - 
Wlaat is Doa»e witli <j5oose-I|siills. 
A goose is not so fine nor so proud a bird as a peacock, 
but it is a far more uscfur one, and when you come to 
learn to how many uses 
its feathers are put 
every day of our lives, 
in many parts of the 
world, you will think 
more of a goose than 
ever before. Every per¬ 
son, young or old, 
knows that beds and 
pillows are often filled 
with goose feathers and 
down, but since quill- 
pens have almost gone 
out of use, few people 
think of what becomes 
of the quills. Years 
ago, before we had steel 
or gold pens, everybody 
used to write with 
quills, and learned to 
make their own pens 
for themselves. Now 
few quill pens are used, 
and most of those that 
are, are made by ma¬ 
chines. But this is one 
of the least of the uses 
to which quills are 
now put. Besides their use as pens, the hollow part or 
“ barrel ” of the quill, serves as handles for paint-brushes, 
or camel’s hair pencils as they are called; toothpicks, 
tubes for discharging cannons, and floats for fishing are 
made from the quills ; the little pieces left after cutting out 
these are used to make parts of children’s toys. But the 
most curious of all things about goose-quills, are the 
uses which are made of the feather parts of them, 
such as a variety of toys, the curled trimmings for 
ladies’ hats and dresses, artificial flowers, plush for vel¬ 
vet wall-papers, carpets, and door-mats, and rugs, and 
lastly felt and woven cloth for dresses. What next will 
be made from goose-quills who can guess after all this. 
Suppose you take a goose-quill and hold it while we 
talk about it. When you look at it you will sec that it 
has a “ vane ” or feather upon each side, and one of these 
is narrow and the other much wider, and the two cover¬ 
ings of the back, or upper part of the stem between these 
vanes, are hard and horny, but smooth, one being very 
thin and the other thicker, while on the under side the 
covering is softer, and has a groove up and down the 
middle of it. When the covering is taken off, you find a soft 
spongy pith under it. Let us take a very sharp pen-knife, 
and divide our quill into these separate parts as is seen at 
figure 1. To do this well we should soak it in warm wa¬ 
ter, when it can be done easily. First we take off the 
thin upper horny covering of the back, marked 1 in the 
engraving. This is called by the French people, who do 
the most of this work, the brillantine , because when it is 
stripped off it shows all the colors of the rainbow very 
brightly. This is used by the milliners for trimming 
bonnets, and mixing with curled and floating feathers for 
ladies’ head-dresses. These strips are tied up in pack¬ 
ages of one thousand each, and 10 packages arc put into 
a bundle, and if we were to look into one of these fac¬ 
tories, we might see great piles of these bundles, and 
should wonder where all the geese lived from which so 
Fig. 2. —MAKING TOOTH-PICKS. 
many quills had been procured. The brillantine is strip¬ 
ped off by women, who are paid about 16 cents for every 
thousand strips, but they do it so quickly that they earn 
very good wages even at that low rate. Then we should 
strip off the small vane with our sharp knife, and this, 
marked 2, is called the biot, which the French pronounce 
beeo. This is dyed of various colors and curled, when it 
is used to make wreaths and piece trimmings for bonnets, 
hats, and sacques, and also artificial flowers. Then we 
take off the large vane marked 3. This is dyed, and 
in dyeing are made proof against moths, when they are 
woven in amongst the threads of stout cloth, and made 
into handsome carpets and rugs, which are very durable. 
To give the carpets the appearance of velvet, the feathery 
surface is brushed with stiff brushes, worked by machin¬ 
ery, for several hours. Neither mud nor dust will stick 
to these carpets. Next we take off the second covering 
of the upper side, marked 4. This is very strong and 
horny, and in the factories this is done by a machine, 
something like one of our planing mills. A roller 
draws the quill over a sharp blade, which strips off' the 
covering. At one of the factories it was tried to make 
straw hats of these strips, but when one of these hats 
was caught out in a shower, it curled and twisted out of 
all shape so badly, that no more were made. The strips 
are now split into very narrow threads like wires, in a 
machine, which is tended by women and girls, and these 
threads are dyed and made into hair brushes and others, 
or into artificial flowers, serving as awns or beards for 
wheat, barley or rye heads, or thorns for prickly plants. 
After this we would strip off the under covering of the 
quill, marked 5. This is used for similar purposes as the 
last mentioned, but is much softer. It takes 3,000 of 
these strips to weigh a pound, and a smart girl will make 
0 pounds in a day, putting one at a time through the 
rollers of the machine. There is nothing left now but the 
pith, marked 6. This is much like the pith of a rush, or 
a piece of elder wood, and is ground up to a sort of fine 
woolly dust, which is dyed and scattered upon the glued 
sticky surface of wall-papers, making the fine velvet or 
flock papers, which are sold at high prices. This plush 
used to be the wool dust made in shearing “ broad 
cloth; ” but now the quill dust is found to be much bet¬ 
ter, and the wool is only used on cheap papers. This 
ends the feather part, and we have the barrel of the quill 
left. These are sorted very carefully into different sizes, 
which are numbered from 1 to 20. Those of one particu¬ 
lar size are selected one by one for tubes for firing cannon. 
These must all be exactly of the same size, or they will 
not fit the touchhole, and a goose has but two of the 
proper size, while many have not a single quill suited for 
this purpose. Every month at the arsenal of Toulon, in 
France, alone, 54,000 of these tubes are received; you can 
judge of how many geese must be killed every year, to 
furnish all the quills needed for this one use. The next 
best quills are used for making handles for small paint 
brushes. Then come the tooth-picks, and a hundred 
million a year of these are made in France, and many 
millions elsewhere, and 
sent all over the world 
for sale and use. To 
make these the quills 
are first cleaned by 
soaking them in water 
and rolling them round 
in a barrel, by whiclu 
the thin outside skin is 
worn off, and the inside 
marrow or pith shaken 
out. Then they are put 
one by one into a ma¬ 
chine which has a sharp 
knife moving up and 
down very quickly, 
and cut into the shape 
shown at figure 2. This machine counts the tooth-picks 
as they are made, and keeps the count by means of 
wheels, which mark up to 1,000,000. Some of the tooth¬ 
picks used in this country, have the name of the hotel 
for which they are bought stamped on them, and some of 
those used in Spain have mottoes on them, as we have 
on some of our candies. These are stamped upon the 
quills before they are cut, by first placing them in warm 
sand, and then pressing them upon a cold piece of iron 
upon which the words are engraved. The sudden cooling 
by the cold letters, makes the quill clear and transparent 
where the letters touch them, but no where else. When 
the quills are made they are packed in bundles for sale. 
The machine for doing this is shown in figure 3. A girl 
fills the holder, A, and slips the ring B around the bunch, 
which is then taken out and tied with two bands, as seen 
at C ; they are then ready for sale. Pens are made by 
slitting the quills with a fine circular saw, and stamping 
them out by a machine, which also counts them as they 
are made. The poorer quills are made into floats for fish¬ 
lines. The points, which are cut oil' and washed, are 
used in toys for children ; they have one end stuck into 
a wooden roller or shaft, and when this is turned by a 
crank, their other ends touch some stretched wires, 
and make what the little folks call music, but their 
parents call it something else. The toy makers can not 
get enough of these points, and they are sent to many 
countries for this purpose. The tops of some of the quills 
are dyed and made into windmills for children, and.are 
also now put together to make bird’s wings for trimming 
girl's hats, and the small red feathers for small boy’s hats. 
ITic Doctor’s Talks-About Rais¬ 
ing Piants. 
Mary M. L., Moline, Ill., would like to know how to 
grow a rose-bush from a slip. I have no doubt that 
many other girls, and some boys, would like to know 
not only about roses, but other plants, and I think I will 
make a “ Talk ” about it. Those who have plants would 
raise other plants for themselves, or to give to their 
friends, if they knew how easily it was done. There arc 
Fig. 3. —BUNCHING. 
many plants which ripen seeds very rarely, or not at all, 
or if sowed the seeds would be a long while in growing 
large enough to flower, so these are raised by taking a 
piece of the plant and putting it in the earth to take 
root; the old way was to pull or slip off a little branch, 
and the piece was called, and sometimes is now, “a 
slip.” But that is a slow and wasteful way, and now 
gardeners cut off the right kind of pieces and call them 
cuttings. A great many plants are raised from cuttings, 
some florists turning out hundreds of thousands every 
year: there is no secret about it, and with the common 
plants, boys and girls can do this as well as 
the florists. You have, no doubt, raised 
plants from seeds ; some of you will recol¬ 
lect that a few years ago I told you all about 
seeds ; that there was a little plant in each 
seed, not a very perfect plant, but in most 
seeds you can see a little bit of stem and 
one or two leaves ; when the seed is put 
into the ground, this little plant, often bent 
up by being packed away so closely, 
straightens itself out, and very soon roots 
appear on the little stem, and the plant 
which began to grow before it had any roots, 
grows all the faster with them, for you of 
course know that one use of roots is to feed 
the plant; they take up the water in which 
much of the plant’s food is dissolved, and 
give it something to grow with. Seeds have 
inside of them some food for the plants to 
use until they have roots and can feed them¬ 
selves. Now, in a cutting we take off a 
piece of a stem, and in the first place let us 
examine a stem and see what we have to 
deal with. Here, figure 1, is a cutting of a 
Fuchsia. You see it has a stem and leaves; 
there are four good sized leaves, and at the 
very top two just growing, and if you 
examine the living plant, you would see 
a, little point or knob between these 
from which more leaves will come, and as these 
leaves enlarge, a bit of stem grows too, to lift them 
above the older leaves ; the stem keeps growing longer, 
and more leaves unfold. This growing point at the end 
of the stem is the terminal bud. You will see that where 
the lower leaves join the stem, there are other buds (only 
one of them show's in the engraving), these buds are 
called axillary buds, as they are placed in the axilla , or 
armpit, where the leaf is fastened to the stem. When 
these buds grow they form branches just like the one 
from which they start. While plants are growing their 
buds are not so plainly seen as when at rest. If you 
look at the trees and shrubs that drop their leaves in the 
fall, you can see the buds very plainly. Figure 2 is the 
gtem of a horse chestnut; you see at the top a very large 
