458 
Reviews. 
(  Am.  Jour.  Pharm. 
I     August,  1896. 
— a  product  which  has  not,  up  to  the  present,  been  heard  of  in  the  alkali 
industry. 
The  installation  of  the  English  Castner-Kellner  Alkali  Company  is  to  be  of 
4,000  horse-power,  and  will  turn  out  6,300  tons  of  pure  caustic  soda,  and  13,600 
tons  of  bleaching  powder  per  year.  In  this  country  the  Mathieson  Alkali 
Company  is  erecting  a  plant  of  2,000  horse-power  at  Niagara  Falls,  to  work 
the  Castner  patents. 
The  third  process  referred  to  is  that  of  Jas.  Hargreaves,  in  which  a  porous 
diaphragm  is  used  on  either  side  of  the  positive  compartment,  within  which 
the  electrolyte  is  placed,  while  the  negative  compartments  to  either  side  are 
empty  at  first.  When  the  current  passes,  chlorine  is  evolved  in  the  positive 
compartment,  while  caustic  soda  oozes  through  the  diaphragm  to  either  side, 
and  is  s\vept  off  the  outside  of  the  same  by  a  current  of  steam,  and  rapidly 
converted  into  carbonate  of  soda. 
The  experiments  made  at  the  works  of  the  General  Electrolytic  Company, 
at  Farnsworth,  near  Widnes,  in  Lancashire,  show  that,  with  2,000  horse-power, 
5,830  pounds  of  sodium  chloride  will  be  decomposed  daity,  and  that  the  pro- 
ducts of  the  electrolysis  will  be  26X  tons  of  bleaching  powder  and  15  tons  of 
sodium  carbonate.  The  cost  by  this  process  seems  to  be  less  than  that  by 
either  of  the  two  before  mentioned. 
The  one  thing  which  seems  abundantly  demonstrated  is  that  the  manufacture 
of  caustic  alkali  and  bleaching  powder  is  no  longer  dependent  upon  the  time- 
honored  Leblanc  process,  which  seems  destined  to  give  way,  in  the  near  future, 
to  simpler  methods,  which  at  the  same  time  yield  purer  products. 
S.  P.  S. 
REVIEWS  AND  BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  NOTICES. 
Yearbook  of  the  United  States  Department  of  Agriculture,  1895. 
Washington:  Government  Printing  Office,  1896.  Pp.616. 
Over  500  pages  of  the  book  are  devoted  to  original  articles,  most  of  which 
contain  a  fund  of  practical  information,  the  value  of  which  is  not  limited  to 
the  agriculturists  for  whom  they  were  prepared.  Among  the  thirty  original 
papers,  we  especially  note  the  following  :  "  Soil  Ferments  Important  in  Agri- 
culture," by  H.  W.  Wiley;  "Frosts  and  Freezes  as  Affecting  Cultivated 
Plants,"  by  B.  T.  Galloway  ;  "  Oil-Producing  Seeds,"  by  G.  H.  Hicks  ;  "Some 
Additions  to  Our  Vegetable  Dietary,"  by  F.  V.  Coville  ;  "The  Pineapple  In- 
dustry in  the  United  States,"  by  H.  J.  Webber  ;  "  The  Relations  of  Forests  to 
Farms,"  by  B.  E.  Fernow  ;  " Inefficiency  of  Milk  Separators  in  Removing 
Bacteria,"  by  V.  A.  Moore.  A  number  of  these  contributions  are  handsomely 
illustrated.  The  paper  on  oil-producing  seeds  is  of  special  interest  to  pharma- 
cists, because  of  its  completeness  on  the  sources  of  fixed  oils  and  statistics  con- 
cerning them. 
UEBER  Einige  NEUE  Abkommlinge  DES  Terpineo^S.  Von  Henry  V. 
Arny.  Inaugural  Dissertation  for  the  Degree  of  Doctor  in  Philosophy.  Got- 
tingen.  1896. 
The  author  reached  the  following  conclusions  as  the  result  of  his  investiga- 
tion : 
