ALCOHOL  AS  A  TEST  FOR  CROTON  OIL.  191 
publication  in  your  journal,  I  hope  many  chemists  will  profit  by 
my  experience,  and  I  shall  be  glad  to  hear  that  the  same  ex- 
periment, tried  by  others,  yields  results  as  satisfactory. 
I  remain  yours  truly,  C.  F.  Bevan. 
Harwich,  February  14,  1864. 
— London  Pharm.  Journal, 
EXPERIMENTS  ON  THE  ACTION  OF  THE  AIR  ON  VEGE- 
TABLE FATTY  OILS. 
By  M.  S.  Cloeg. 
It  may  be  asked  under  what  form  the  carbon  and  hydrogen 
are  eliminated  in  the  course  of  the  oxidation  of  oils.  1  agree  with 
Saussure,  that  a  portion  of  the  carbon  passes  to  the  state  of  car- 
bonic acid,  but  I  have,  moreover,  ascertained  that  the  amount  of 
carbonic  acid  produced  does  not  nearly  represent  the  whole  of 
the  carbon  which  has  disappeared. 
In  the  same  way  with  hydrogen,  part  is  disengaged  as  water, 
but  it  is  also  eliminated  under  some  other  form. 
These  facts  are  easily  explained  by  the  production  of  a  car- 
bonised volatile  compound,  the  pungent  odor  of  which  greatly 
resembles  that  of  acrolein  ;  this  is  a  substance  which  browns  the 
sheets  of  unsized  paper,  serving  to  recover  the  oils  exposed  to 
the  air. 
Some  old  books  are  colored  in  the  same  way,  and  I  believe 
that  this  coloration  is  the  result  of  the  slow  oxidation  of  the  oil 
used  in  the  printing  ink,  and  the  formation  of  a  product  possess- 
ing a  stifling  odor,  similar  to  that  which  I  have  recognized  in 
air  which  has  been  for  about  ten  days  in  contact  with  a  siccative 
oil. — Lond.  Chem.  News,  March  24,  1865. 
ALCOHOL  AS  A  TEST  FOR  CROTON  OIL. 
Mr.  R.  Warrington,  F.  R.  S.,  has  published  in  the  Pharma- 
ceutical Journal  some  experiments  on  the  British  Pharmacopoeia 
test  for  croton  oil,  which  have  led  him  to  conclude  that  the 
use  of  alcohol  as  a  test  for  the  purity  of  the  oil  is  of  no  value. 
His  own  opinion,  he  states,  is  that  freshly  expressed  oil,  or 
rather  oil  expressed  from  fresh  seeds,  either  abroad  or  in  this 
country,  does  not  dissolve  in  alcohol  sp.  gr.  '794 — .796  to  a 
