Kotka Nyheter 59, 9.8.1921
En engelsk efter tidnings modekåsör lämnar en liten skildring av de allra senaste modeexentriciteterna. Skorna skola nu ha en färg, som överensstämmer med bärarinnans hår - då måste de kanariegula, vätesuperoxidfärgade bli en vogue, ty ännu finnes konstigt nog en hel armé damer, som vilja inbilla världen, att de äro blonda. Att de se ut som spräckliga hönor efter en tid, då färgen släpper bekommer dem mindre än intet. Skola nu skorna också vara spräckliga månne?
Den engelska modekåsören har också "tippat" en annan nyhet: till hösten komma de damer som vilja vara riktigt fashinonabla att ha färgade naglar. Färgen skall överensstämma med klänningens.
Kom sedan och tala om bristande färg glädje!
Coloriasto on väriaiheisten tekstien (ja kuvien) verkkoarkisto
(Archive for colour themed articles and images)
INDEX: coloriasto.net
29.3.20
28.3.20
Grant Allen: The colors of flowers.
The Living age 1963, 4.2.1882
From The Cornhill Magazine.
Before me, as I write, stands a small specimen vase, containing a little Scotch bluebell, picked upon a bleak, open moorside, yet wonderfully delicate and fragile in stem, and leaf, and bud, and blossom. For the bluebells of Scotland, the bluebells of Walter Scott and of all the old ballad poetry, are not our stiff, thickstemmed English wild hyacinths, but the same dainty, drooping flowers which we in the south call harebells. The word ought really to be heather-bell; but the corruption is quite in accordance with a common law of English phonology, which has similarly degraded several other early words by dropping out the th between two vowels. Harebell or heather-bell or bluebell, the flower is one of our prettiest and most graceful native forms; and the exquisite depth of its color has always made it a prime favorite with our poets and our children alike. How it first got that beautiful color is the problem which I wish, if possible. to settle to-day.
I am not going to inquire at present why the harebell is colored at all. That question I suppose everybody has now heard answered a dozen times over at least. We all know nowadays that the colors of flowers are useful to them in attracting the insects which fertilize their embryo seeds; and that only those flowers possess bright hues which thus depend upon insects for the impregnation of their ovules. Wind - fertilized blossoms, in which the pollen of one head is carried by chance breezes to the stigma of another, are always small, green, and comparatively inconspicuous. It is only those plants which are indebted to bees or butterflies for the due setting of their seeds that ever advertise their store of honey by bright-hued petals. All this, as I say, we have each of us heard long ago. So the specific question which I wish to attack to-day is not why the harebell is colored, but why it is colored blue. And, in getting at the answer to this one test-question, I hope incidentally to answer the wider question why any given flower whatsoever should be blue, let us say, or red, or lilac, rather than orange, yellow, white, or any other possible color in nature except the one which it actually happens to be.
Briefly put, the general conclusion at which I have arrived is this: all flowers were in their earliest form yellow; then, some of them became white; after that, a few of them grew to be red or purple; and finally a comparatively small number acquired various shades of lilac, mauve, violet, or blue. So that, if this principle be true, the harebell will represent one of the most highly developed lines of descent; and its ancestors will have passed successively through all the intermediate stages. Let us see what grounds can be given for such a belief.
In the first place, it is well to observe that when we speak of the colors of flowers we generally mean the color of the petals alone. For in most cases the stamens and other central organs, which form, botanically speaking, the really important part of the blossom, are yellow. or at least yellowish; while the petals may be blue, red, pink, orange, lilac, or even green. But as the central organs are comparatively small, whereas the petals are large and conspicuous, we naturally speak of flowers in everyday talk as having the color of their petals, which form by far the greater and most noticeable part of their whole surface. Our question, then, narrows itself down to this — Why are the petals in any particular blossom of one color rather than another?
Now petals, as I have more than once already explained to the readers of this magazine, are in all probability originally I enlarged and flattened stamens, which have been set apart for the special work of attracting insects. It seems likely that i all flowers at first consisted of the central organs alone — that is to say, the pistil, which contains the ovary with its embryo seeds; and the stamens, which produce the pollen, whose cooperation is necessary in order to fertilize these same embryo ovules and to make the pistil mature into the ripe fruit. But in those plants which took to fertilization by means of insects — or, one ought rather to say, in those plants which insects took to visiting for the sake of their honey or pollen, and so unconsciously fertilizing — the flowers soon began to produce an outer row of barren and specialized stamens, adapted by their size and color for attracting the fertilizing insects; and these barren and specialized stamens are what we commonly call petals. Any flowers which thus presented brilliant masses of color to allure the eyes of the beetles, the bees, and the butterflies would naturally receive the greatest number of visits from their insect friends, and would therefore stand the best chance of setting their seeds, as well as of producing healthy and vigorous offspring as the result of a proper cross. In this way, they would gain an advantage in the struggle for life over their less fortunate compeers, and would hand down their own peculiarities to their descendants after them.
* In a part of this article I shall have to go over ground already considered in a valuable paper read by Sir John Lubbock before the British Association at York last August, and I shall take part of my examples from his interesting collection of facts as reported in Nature. But, at the same time. I should like at the outset to point out that I venture to differ on two points from his great authority. In the first place, I do not think all flowers were originally green, because I believe petals were first derived from altered stamens, not from altered sepals or bracts, and that modern green flowers are degraded types, not survivals of early forms. And in the second place. I think yellow petals preceded white petals in the order of time, and not vice versa. I may also perhaps be excused for adding that I had already arrived at most of the substantive conclusions set forth in this article before the appearance of Sir John Lubbock's paper, and bad incidentally put forward the greater part of them, though dogmatically and without fully stating my reasons, in an article on the "Daisy's Pedigree," published in the Cornhill Magazine, and in another on the "Rose family," published in Belgaria, both for August, 1881. At the same time, must express my indebtness for many new details to Sir John Lubbock's admirable paper. Of course this note is only appended for the behoof of scientific readers. But as the stamens of almost all flowers, certainly of all the oldest and simplest flowers, are yellow, it would naturally follow that the earliest petals would be yellow too. When the stamens of the outer row were flattened and broadened into petals, there would be no particular reason why they should change their color; and, in the absence of any good reason, they doubtless retained it as before. Indeed, I shall try to show, a little later on, that the earliest and simplest types of existing flowers are almost always yellow, seldom white, and never blue; and this in itself would he a sufficient ground for believing that yellow was the original color of all petals.* But as I am personally somewhat heretical, in believing, contrary to the general run of existing scientific opinion, that petals are derived from flattened stamens, not front simplified and attenuated leaves, I shall venture to detail here the reasons for this belief; because it seems to me of capital importance in connection with our present subject. For if the petals were originally a row of stamens set apart for the function of attracting insects, it would be natural and obvious why they should begin by being yellow; but if they were originally a set of leaves, which became thinner and more brightly colored for the sante purpose, it would be difficult to see why they should first have assumed any one color rather than another.
The accepted doctrine as to the nature of petals is that discovered by Wolff and afterwards rediscovered by Goethe, after whose name it is usually called; for of course, as in all such cases, the greater man's fame has swallowed up the fame of the lesser. Goethe held that all the parts of the flower were really modified leaves, and that a gradual transition could be traced between them, from the ordinary leaf through the stemleaf and the bract to the sepal (or division of the calyx), the petal, the stamen, and the ovary or carpel. Now, if we look at most modern flowers, such a transition can undoubtedly be observed; and sometimes it is very delicately graduated. so that you can hardly say where each sort of leaf merges into the next. But, unfortunately for the truth of the theory as ordinarily understood, we now know that in the earliest flowers there were no petals or sepals. but that primitive flowering plants had simply leaves on the one hand, and stamens and ovules on the other. The oldest types of flowers at present surviving, those of the pine tribe and of the tropical cycads (such as the wellknown zamias of our conservatories), have still only these simple elements. But if petals and sepals are later in origin (as we know them to be) than stamens and carpels, we cannot say, it seems to me, that they mark the transition from one form to the other, any more than we can say that Gothic architecture i marks the transition from the Egyptian style to the classical Greek. I do not mean to deny that the stamen and the ovary are themselves by origin modified leaves — that part of the Wolffian theory is absolutely irrefutable — but what I do mean to say is this, that, with the light shed upon the subject by the modern doctrine of evolution, we can no longer regard petals and sepals as intermediate stages between the two. The earliest flowering plants had true leaves on the one hand, and specialized pollen-bearing or ovule-bearing leaves on the other hand, which latter are what we call stamens and carpels; but they had no petals at all. and the petals of modern flowers have been produced at some later period. I believe, also, they have been produced by a modification of certain external stamens, not by a modification of true leaves. Instead of being leaves arrested on their way towards becoming stamens, they are stamens which have partially reverted towards the condition of leaves. They differ from true leaves, however, in their thin, spongy texture, and in the bright pigments with which they are adorned.
All stamens show a great tendency easily to become petaloid, as the technical botanists call it; that is to say, to flatten out their filament or stalk, and finally to lose their pollen-bearing sacs or anthers. In the waterlilies — which are one of the oldest and simplest types of flowers we now possess, still preserving many antique points of structure unchanged — we can trace a regular gradation from the perfect stamen to the perfect petal. In the centre of the flower, we find stamens of the ordinary sort. w ith rounded stalks or filaments, and long, yellow anthers full of pollen at the end of each; then, as we move outward, we find the filaments growing flatter and broader, and the pollensacs less and less perfect; next we find a few stamens which look exactly like petals, only that they have two abortive anthers stuck awkwardly on to their summits; and, finally, we find true petals, broad and flat, yellow or white as the case may be, and without any trace of the anthers at all. Here in this very ancient flower we have stereotyped for us as it were, the mode in which stamens first developed into petals, under stress of insect selection.
* I must add that i do not in the least doubt the tee, of Wohlff's great generalisation in the way in which he meant it — the existence of a homology between the leaf and all the floral organs; I only mean that the conception requires to be modified a little by the light later evolutionary discoveries. "But how do you know," some one may ask, "that the transition was not in the opposite direction? How do you know that the waterlily had not petals alone to start with, and that these did not afterwards develop, as the Wolffian hypothesis would have us believe, into stamens "Well, for a very simple reason. The theory of Wolff and Goethe is quite in compatible with the doctrine of development, at least if accepted as a historical explanation (which Wolff and Goethe of course never meant it to be). Flowers can and do exist without petals, which are no essential part of the organism, but a mere set of attractive colored advertise. ments for alluring insects; but no flower can possibly exist without stamens, which are one of the two essential reproductive organs in the plant. Without pollen. no flower can set its seeds. A parallel from the animal world will make this immediately obvious. Hive-bees consist of three kinds the queens or fertile females, the drones or males, and the workers or neuters. Now it would be absurd to ask whether the queens were developed from an original class of neuters, or the neuters from an original class of fertile females. Neuters left to themselves would die out in a single generation: they are really sterilized females, set apart for a special function on behalf of the hive. It is just the same with petals: they are sterilized stamens, set apart for the special function of attracting insects on be. half of the entire flower. But to ask which came first, the petals or the stamens, is as absurd as to ask which came first, the male and female bees or the neuters.*
In many other cases besides the waterlily, we know that stamens often turn into petals. Thus the numerous colored rays of the mesembryantheinums or ice-plant family are acknowledged to be flattened stamens. In double roses and almost all other double flowers the extra petals are produced from the stamens of the interior. In short, stamens generally can be readily converted into petals, especially in rich and fertile soils or under cultivation. Even where stamens always retain their pollensacs, they have often broad, flattened, petaloid filaments, as in the star of Bethlehem and many other flowers. Looking at the question as a whole, we can sec how petals might easily have taken their origin from stamens, while it is difficult to understand how they could have taken their origin from ordinary leaves — a process of which if it ever took place, no hint now remains to us. We shall see hereafter that the manner in which certain outer florets in the compound flower-heads of the daisy or the aster have been sterilized and specialized for the work of attraction, affords an exact analogy to the manner in which it is here suggested that certain stamens may at an earlier date have been sterilized and specialized for the same purpose, thus giving rise to what we know as petals.
We may take it for granted, then (to return from this long but needful digression), that the earliest petals were derived from flattened stamens, and were therefore probably yellow in color, like the stamens from which they took their origin. The question next arises — How did some of them afterwards come to be orange, red, purple, or blue?
A few years aco, when the problem of the connection Between flowers and insects still remained much in the state where Sprengel left it at the end of the last century, it would have seemed quite impossible to answer this question. But nowadays, after the full researches of Darwin. Wallace, Lubbock, and Hermann Müller into the subject, we can give a very satisfactory solution indeed. We now know, not only that the colors of flowers as a whole are intended to attract insects in general, but that certain colors are definitely intended to attract certain special kinds of insects. Thus, to take a few examples only out of hundreds that might be cited, the flowers which lay themselves out for fertilization by miscellaneous small flies are almost always white; those which depend upon the beetles are generally yellow; while those which bid for the favor of bees and butterflies are usually red, purple, lilac, or blue. Certain insects always visit one species of flower alone; and others pass from blossom to blossom of one kind only on a single day, though they may vary a little from kind to kind as the season advances, and one species replaces another. Muller, the most statistical of naturalists, has noticed that while bees form seventy-five per cent. of the insects visiting the very developed composites, theyform only fourteen per cent. of those visiting umbelliferous plants, which have, as a rule, open but by no means showy white flowers. Certain blossoms which lay themselves out to attract wasps are, as he quaintly puts it, "obviously adapted to a less zesthetically cultivated circle of visitors." And some livid red flowers actually resemble in their color and odor decaying raw meat, thus inducing bluebottle flies to visit them and so carry their pollen from head to head.
Down to the minutest distinctions between species, this correlation of flowers to the tastes of their particular guests seems to hold good. Hermann Muller notes that the common galium of our heaths and hedges is white, and therefore visited by small flies; while the lady's bedstraw. its near relative, is yellow, and owes its fertilization to little beetles. Mr. H. O. Forbes counted on one occasion the visits he saw paid to the flowers on a single bank; and he found that a particular bumblebee sucked the honey of thirty purple deadnettles in succession, passing over without notice all the other plants in the neighborhood; two other species of bumblebee and a cabbage butterfly also patronized the same deadnettles exclusively. Fritz Muller noticed a lantana in South America which changes color as its flowering advances; and he observed that each kind of butterfly which visited it stuck rigidly to its own favorite color, waiting to pay its addresses until that color appeared. Mr. Darwin cut off the petals of a lobelia and found that the hive-bees never went near it, though they were very busy with the surrounding flowers. But perhaps Sir John Lubbock's latest experiments on bees are the most conclusive of all. lie had long ago convinced himself, by trials with honey placed on slips of glass above yellow, pink, or blue paper, that bees could discriminate the different colors; and he has now shown in the same way that they display a marked preference for blue over all others. The fact is, blue flowers arc, as a rule, specialized for fertilization by bees, and bees therefore prefer this color; while conversely the flowers have at the same time become blue because that was the color which the bees prefer. As in most other cases, the adaptation must have gone on pari passu on both sides. As the beeflowers grew bluer, the bees must have grown fonder and fonder of blue; and as they grew fonder of blue, they must have more and more constantly preferred the bluest flowers.
We thus see how the special tastes of insects may have become the selective agency for developing white, pink, red, purple, and blue petals from the original yellow ones. But before they could exercise such a selective action, the petals must themselves have shown some tendency to vary in certain fixed directions. How could such an original tendency arise? For, of course, if the insects never saw any pink, purple, or blue petals, they could not specially favor and select them; so that we are as yet hardly nearer the solution of the problem than ever.
Here Mr. Sorby, who has chemically studied the coloring matter of leaves and flowers far more deeply than any other investigator, supplies us with a useful hint. lie tells us that the various pigments of bright petals are already contained in the ordinary tissues of the plant, whose juices only need to be slightly modified in chemical constitution in order to make them into the blues, pinks, and purples with which we are so familiar. "The colored substances in the petals," he says, "are in many cases exactly the same as those in the foliage from which chlorophyll has disappeared; so that the petals are often exactly like leaves which have turned yellow and red in autumn, or the very yellow or red leaves of early spring." " The color of many crimson, pink, and red flowers is due to the development of substances belonging to the erythrophyll group, and not unfrequently to exactly the same kind as that so often found in leaves. The facts seem to indicate that these various substances may be due to an alteration of the normal constituents of leaves. So far as I have been able to ascertain, their development seems as if related to extra oxidization, modified by light and other varying conditions not yet understood."
The different hues assumed by petals are all thus, as it were, laid up beforehand in the tissues of the plant, ready to be brought out at a moment's notice. And all flowers, as we know, easily sport a little in color. But the question is, do their changes tend to follow any regular and definite order? Is there any reason to believe that the modification runs from yellow through red to blue, rather than vice versa? I believe there is; and we get hints of it in the following fashion.
One of our common little English forget-me-nots, by name Myosotis versicolor (may I be pardoned for using a few scientific names just this once?) is pale yellow when it first opens; but as it grows older, it becomes faintly pinkish, and ends by being blue like the others of its race. Now, this sort of colorchange is by no means uncommon; and in all the cases that I know of it is always in the same direction, from yellow or white, through pink, orange, or red, to purple or blue. For example, one of the wall-flower tribe, Cheiranthus chamerleo, has at first a whitish flower, then a citronyellow, and finally emerges into red or violet. The petals of Stylidium fruticosum are pale yellow to begin with, and afterwards become light rose-colored. Au evening primrose, Œnothera tetraptera, has white flowers in its first stage and red ones at a later period of development. Cobæa scandensgoes from white to violet; Hibiscus mutabilis from white through flesh-colored to red. Fritz Muller's lantana is yellow on its first day, orange on the second, and purple on the third. The whole tribe of borages begin by being pink and end with being blue. The garden convolvulus opens a blushing white and passes into full purple. In all these and many other cases the general direction of the changes is the same. They are usually set down as due to oxidation of the pigmentary matter.
If this be so, there is a good reason why bees should be specially fond of blue, and why blue flowers should be specially adapted for fertilization by their aid. For Mr. A. R. Wallace has shown that color is most apt to appear or to vary in those parts of plants or animals which have undergone the highest amount of modification: The markings of the peacock and the argus pheasant come out upon their immensely developed secondary tail-feathers or wingplumes; the metallic hues of sunbirds and humming-birds show themselves upon their highly specialized crests, gorgets, or lappets. It is the same with the hackles of fowls, the head-ornaments of fruitpigeons, and the bills of toucans. The most exquisite colors in the insect world are those which are developed on the greatly expanded and delicately feathered wings of butterflies; and the eyespots which adorn a few species are usually found on their very highly modified swallow-tail appendages. So, too, with flowers; those which have undergone most modification have their colors most profoundly altered. In this way, we may put it down as a general rule (to be tested hereafter) that the least developed flowers are usually yellow or white; those which have undergone a little more modification are usually pink or red; and those which have been most highly specialized of any are usually purple, lilac, or blue. Absolute deep ultramarine, like that of this harebell, probably marks the highest level of all.
On the other hand, Mr. Wallace's principle also explains why the bees and but terflies should prefer these specialized colors to all others, and should therefore select the flowers which display them by preference over any less developed types. For bees and butterflies are the most highly adapted of all insects to honey seeking and flowerfeeding. They have themselves on their side undergone the largest amount of specialization for that particular function. And if the more specialized and modified flowers, which ; gradually fitted their forms and the position of their honeyglands to the forms of the bees or butterflies, showed a natural tendency to pass from yellow through pink and red to purple and blue, it would follow that the insects which were being evolved side by side with them, and which were aiding at the same time in their evolution, would grow to recognize these developed colors as the visible symbols of those flowers from which they could obtain the largest amount of honey with the least possible trouble. Thus it would finally result that the ordinary unspecialized flowers, which depended upon small insect riffraff, would be mostly left yellow or white; those which appealed to rather higher insects would become pink or red; and those which laid themselves out for bees and butterflies, the aristocrats of the arthropodous world, would grow for the most part to he purple or blue.
Now, this is very much what we actually find to be the case in nature. The simplest and earliest flowers are those with regular, symmetrical, open cups, which can be visited by any insects whatsoever; and these are in large part yellow or white. A little higher are the flowers with more or less closed cups, whose honey can only be reached by more specialized insects; and these are oftener pink or reddish. More profoundly modified are those irregular onesided flowers, which have assumed special shapes to accommodate bees or other specific
honeyseekers; and these are often purple and not infrequently blue. Highly specialized in another way are the flowers whose petals have all coalesced into a tubular corolla; and these might almost be said to be usually purple or blue. And, finally, highest of all are the flowers whose tubular corolla has been turned to one side, thus combining the united petals with the irregular shape; and these are almost invariably purple or blue. I shall proceed in the sequel to give examples.
One may say that the most profoundly modified of all existing flowers are the families of the composites, the labiates, the snapdragons, and the orchids. Now these are exactly the families in which blue and purple flowers are commonest; while in all of them, except the composites. white flowers are rare, and unmixed yellow flowers almost unknown. But perhaps the best way to test the principle will be to look at one or two families in detail, remembering of course that we can only expect approximate results, owing to the natural complexity of the conditions. Not to overburden the subject with unfamiliar names I shall seldom I go beyond the limits of our own native English flora.
The roses form a most instructive family to begin with. As a whole they are not very highly developed, since all of them have simple, open, symmetrical flowers, generally with five distinct petals. Bat of all the rose tribe, as I have endeavored to show elsewhere, the potentilla group, including our common English cinquefoils and silver-weed, seem to make up the most central, simple, and primitive members. They are chiefly low, creeping weeds, and their flowers are of the earliest pattern, without any specialization of form, or any peculiar adaptation to insect visitors. Now among the potentilla group, nearly all the blossoms are yellow, as are also those of the other early allied forms, such as agrimony and herb-bennet. Almost the only white potentillas in England are the barren strawberry and the true strawberry, which have diverged more than any other species from the norms of the race. Water-avens, how-ever, a close relative of herb-bennet. has a dusky purplish tinge and Sir John Lubbuc notes that it secretes honey, and is far oftener visited by insects than its kinsman. The bramble tribe, including the blackberry, raspberry, and dew-berry. have much larger flowers than the potentillas, and are very greatly frequented by winged visitors. Their petals are pure white, often with a pinky tinge, especially on big, well-grown blossoms. But there is one low, little-developed member of the blackberry group, the stone-bramble, with narrow, inconspicuous petals of a greenish yellow, merging into dirty white; and this humble form seems to preserve for us the transitional stage from the yellow potentilla to the true white brambles. One step higher. the cherries, apples, and pears have very large and expanded petals, white toward the centre, but blushing at the edges into rosy pink or bright red. Finally, the true roses, whose flowers are the most developed of all, have usually extremely broad pink petals (like those of our own dog-rose), which in some still bigger exotic species become crimson or damask of the deepest dye. They are more sought after by insects than any others of their family. At the same time, the roses as a whole, being a relatively simple family, with regular symmetrical flowers of the separate type, have never risen to the stage of producing blue petals. That is why our florists cannot turn out a blue rose. It is easy enough to make roses or any other blossoms vary within their own natural limits, revert to any earlier form or color through which they have previously passed; but it is difficult or impossible to make them take a step which they have never yet naturally taken. Hence florists generally find the most developed flowers are also the most variable and plastic in color; and hence, too, we can get red, pink, white, straw-colored, or yellow roses, but not blue ones. This, I believe, is the historical truth underlying De Candolle's division of flowers into a xanthic and a cyanic series.
Still more interesting, because covering a wider range of color, are the buttercup family, whose petals vary from yellow to every shade of crimson, purple, and blue. Here, the simplest and least differentiated members of the group are the common meadow buttercups, which, as everybody knows, have five open petals of a brilliant golden hue. Nowhere else is the exact accordance in color between stamens and petals more noticeable than in these flowers. There are two kinds of buttercup in England, however, which show us the transition from yellow to white actually taking place under our very eyes. These are the water crowfoot and its close ally the ivy-leaved crowfoot, whose petals are still faintly yellow toward the centre, but fade away into primrose and white as they approach the edge. The clematis and anemone, which are more highly developed, have white sepals (for the petals here are suppressed), even in our English species; and exotic kinds varying from pink to purple are cultivated in our flower-gardens. Columbines are very specialized forms of the buttercup type, both sepals and petals being brightly colored, while the former organs are produced above into long, bow-shaped spurs, each of uhich secretes a drop of honey; and various columbines accordingly range from red to purple and dark blue. Even the columbine, however, though so highly specialized, is not bilaterally but circularly symmetrical. This last and highest mode of adaptation to insect visits is found in larkspur, and still more developed in the curious monkshood. Now larkspur is usually blue, though white or red blos-soms sometimes occur by reversion; while monkshood is one of the deepest blue flowers we possess. Sir John Lubbock has shown that a particular bumble-bee (Bontbus hortorum), is the only north European insect capable of fertilizing the larkspur.
The violets are a whole family of bilateral flowers, highly adapted to fertilization by insects, and as a rule they are blue. I sere, too, however, white varieties easily arise by reversion; while one member of the group, the common pansy, is perhaps, the most variable flower in all nature.
Pinks do not display so wide a range in either direction. They begin as high up as white, and never get any higher than red or carnation. The small, undeveloped field species, such as the chick-weeds, stitchworts, and corn-spurries, have open flowers of very primitive character, and almost all of them are white. They are fertilized by miscellaneous small flies. Rut the campions and true pinks have a tubular calyx, and the petals are raised on long claws, while most of them also display special adaptations for a better class of insect fertilization in the way of fringes - or crowns on the petals. These higher kinds are generally pink or red. Our own beautiful purple English corn-cockle is a highly developed campion, so specialized that only butterflies can reach its honey with their long tongues, as the nectaries are situated at the bottom of the tube. Two other species of campion, however, show us interestingly the way in which variations of color may occur in a retrograde direction even among highly evolved forms. One of them, the day lychnis, has red, scentless flowers, opening; in the morning, and it is chiefly fertilized by diurnal butterflies. But its descendant, the night lychnis, has taken to fertilization by means of moths; and as moths can only see white flowers, it has become white, and has acquired a faint perfume as an extra attraction. Still, the change has not yet become fully organized in the species, for one may often find a night lychnis at the present time which is only pale pink, instead of being pure white.
The only other family of flowers with separate petals which I shall consider here is that of the pea-blossoms. These are all bilateral in shape, as everybody knows; but the lower and smaller species, such as the medick, lotus, and lady's fingers, are usually yellow. So also are broom and gorse. Among the mare specialized clovers, some of which are fertilized by bees alone, white, red, and purple predominate. Even with the smaller and earlier types, the most developed species, like lucerne, are likewise purple. But in the largest and most advanced types, the peas, beans, vetches, and scarlet runners, we get much brighter and deeper colors, often with more or less tinge of blue. In the sweet peas and many others, the standard frequently differs in hue from the keel or the wings — a still further advance in heterogeneity of coloration. Lupines, sain loin, everlasting pea, and wistaria are highly evolved meintiers of the same family, in which purple, lilac, mauve, or blue tints become distinctly pronounced.
When we pass on, however, to the flowers in which (as in this harebell) the petals have all coalesced into a tubular or campanulate corolla, we get even more striking results. Here, where the very shape at once betokens high modification, yellow is a comparatively rare color (especially as a ground-tone, though it often comes out in spots or patches), while purple and blue, so rare elsewhere, become almost the rule. For example, in the great family of the heaths, which is highly adapted to insect fertilization, more particularly by bees, purple and blue are the prevailing tints, so much so that, as we all have noticed a hundred times over, they often color whole tracts of hillside together. So far as I know, there are no really yellow heaths at all. The bell shaped blos-soms mark at once the position of the heaths with reference to insects; and the order, according to Mr. Bentham, supplies us with more ornamental plants than any other in the whole world.
It is the same with the families allied to my harebell here. They are, in fact, for the most part larger and handsomer blossoms of the same type as the heaths; and the greater number of them, like the hare-bell itself and the Canterbury bell, are deep blue. Rampion and sheep's bit, also blue, are clustered heads of similar blossoms. The little blue lobelia of our borders, which is bilateral as well as tubular, belongs to a closely related tribe. Not far from them are the lilac scabious, the blue devil's bit, and the mauve teasel. Amongst all these very highly evolved groups blue distinctly forms the prevalent color.
The composites, to which belong the daisies anti dandelions, also give us some extremely striking evidence. Each flower-head here consists of a number of small florets, crowded together so as to resemble a single blossom. So far as our present purpose is concerned, they fall naturally into three groups. The first is that of the dandelions and hawkweeds, with open florets, fertilized, as a rule, by very small insects; and these are generally yellow, with only a very few divergent species. The second is that of the thistleheads, visited by an immense number of insects, including the bees; and these are almost all purple, while some highly evolved species, like the cornflower or bluebottle and the true artichoke, are bright blue. The third is that of the daisies and asters, with tubular central florets and long, flattened outer rays; and these demand a closer examination here.
The central florets of the daisy tribe, as a rule, are brightE;olden; a fact which shows pretty certain),y that they are descended from a common ancestor who was also yellow. Moreover, these yellow florets are bell-shaped, and each contain a pistil and five stamens, like any other perfect flower. But the outer florets are generally sterile; and instead of being bell-shaped they are split down one side and unrolled, so as to form a long ray; while their corolla is at the same time much larger than that of the central blossoms. In short, they are sterilized members of the compound flower-head, specially set apart for the work of display; and thus they stand to the entire flower-head in the same relation as petals do to the simple original flower. The analogy between the two is complete. Just as the petal is a specialized and sterilized stamen told off to do duty as an allurer of insects for the benefit of the whole flower, sit the ray-floret is a specialized and sterilized blossom told off to do the selfsame duty for the benefit of the group of tiny flowers which make up the composite flower-head.
Now, the earliest ray-florets would naturally be bright yellow, like the tubular blossoms of the central disk from which they sprang. And to this day the ray florets of the simplest daisy types, such as the cornmarigold, the sunflower, and the ragwort, are yellow like the central flowers. In the camomile, however, the ox-eye daisy, and the mayweed, the rays have become white; and this, I think, fairly estailishes the fact that white is a higher development of color than yellow; for the change must have been made in order to attract special insects. Certainly, such a differentiation of the flowers in a single head cannot be without a good purpose. In the true daisy, again, the white rays become tipped with pink, which sometimes rises almost to rose-color and this stage is exactly analogous to rose-color; of apple-blossom, which similarly halts on the way from white petals to red. In the asters and Michaelmas daisies we get a further advance to purple, lilac, and mauve. while both in these and in the chrysanthemums true shades of blue not infrequently appear. The cinerarias of our gardeners are similar forms of highly developed groundsels from the Canary Islands.
* Our English archangels and few others are yellow. Such cases of reversion are wit uncommon, and are doubtless due to special insect selection in a retrograde direction.I must pass over the blue tubular gentians and periwinkles, with many other like cases, for I can only find room for two more families. One of these, the borage kind, has highly modified flowers, with a tube below and spreading lobes above; in addition to which most of the species possess remarkable and strongly developed appendages to the corolla, in the way of teeth, crowns, hairs, scales, parapets, or valves. Of the common British species alone, the forget-me-nots are clear sky-blue with a yellow eye; the viper's bugloss is at first reddish purple, and afterwards a deep blue; the lungwort is also dark blue; and so are the two alkanets, the true bugloss, the madwort, and the familiar borage of our claretcup, though all of them by reversion occasion' ally produce purple or white flowers. Iloundstongue is purple red, and most of the other species vary between purple and blue; indeed throughout the family most flowers are red at first and blue as they mature. Of these, borage at least is habitually fertilized by bees, and I believe the same to be partially true of many of the other species. The second highly evolved family to which I wish to draw attention is that of the labiates — perhaps the most specialized of any so far as regards insect fertilization. Not only are they tubular, but they are very bilateral and irregular indeed, displaying more modification of form than any other flowers except the orchids. Almost all of them are purple or blue. Among the bestknown English species are thyme, mint, marjoram, sage, and basil, which I need hardly say are great favorites with bees. Groundivy is bright blue; catmint, pale blue; prunella, violet purple; and common bugle, blue or fleshcolor. Many of the others are purple or purplish.* It must be added thaat in both these families the flowers are very liable to vary within the limit of the same species; and red, white, or purple specimens are common in all the normally blue kinds.
Sometimes, indeed, we may say that the new color has not yet begun to fix itself in the species, but that the hue still varies under our very eyes. Of this the little milkwort (a plant of the type with separate petals) affords an excellent example, for it is occasionally white, usually pink, and not infrequently blue; so that in all probability it is now actually in course of acquiring a new color. Much the same thing happens with the common pimpernel. Its ancestral form is probably the woodland loosestrife, which is yellow; but pimpernel itself is usually or ange red, while a blue variety is frequent on the Continent, and sometimes appears in England as well. Every botanist can add half-adozen equally good instances from his own memory.
So far I have spoken only of what the ladies would call selfcolor, as though every flower were of one unvaried hue throughout. I must now add a few words on the subject of the spots and lines which so often variegate the petals in certain species. On this subject, again, Mr. Wallace's hint is full of meaning. Everywhere in nature, he points out, spots and eyes of color appear on the most highly modified parts, and this rule applies most noticeably to the case of petals. Simple regular flowers, like the buttercups and roses, hardly ever have any spots or lines; but in very modified forms like the labiates and the orchids they are extremely common. The scrophularineous family, to which the snapdragon belongs, is one most specially adapted to insects, and even more irregular than that of the labi; ates; and here we find the most singular effects produced by dappling and mixture of colors. The simple yellow mullein, it is true, has no such spots or lines, nor have even many of the much higher blue veronicas; but in the snapdragons, the foxglove, the toadflax, the ivy-linaria, the eyebright, and the calceolarias, the intl. mate mixture of colors is very noticeable. In the allied tropical bignomas and gloxinias we see much the same distribution of hues. Many of the family are cultivated in gardens on account of their bizarre and fantastic shapes and colors. As to the orchids, I need hardly say anything about their wonderfully spotted and variegated flowers. Even in our small English kinds the dappling is extremely marked, especially upon the expanded and profoundly modified lower lip: but in the larger tropical varieties the patterns are often quaint and even startling in their extraordinary richness of fancy and apparent capriciousness of design. Mr. Darwin has shown that their adaptations to insects are more intimate and more marvellous than those of any other flowers whatsoever.
Structurally speaking, the spots and lines on petals seem to be the direct result of high modification; but functionally, as Sprengel long ago pointed out, they act as honeyguides, and for this purpose they have no doubt undergone special selection by the proper insects. Lines are comparatively rare on regular flowers, but they tend to appear as soon as the flower becomes even slightly bilateral. and they point directly towards the nectaries. The geranium family affords an excellent illustration of this law. The regular forms are mostly uniform in hue; but many of the South African pelargoniums, cultivated in gardens and hothouses, are slightly bilateral, the two upper petals standing off from the three lower ones; and these two become at once marked with dark lines, which are in sonic cases scarcely visible, and in others fairly pronounced. From this simple beginning one can trace a gradual progress in heterogeneity of coloring, till at last the most developed bilateral forms have the two upper petals of quite a different hue front the three lower ones, besides being deeply marked with belts and spots of dappled color. In the allied tropzeolurn or Indian cress (the so-called nasturtium of old-fashioned gardens, thought the plant is really no more related to the watercress and other true nasturtiums than we ourselves are to the great kangaroo) this tendency is carried still further. Here, the calyx is prolonged into a deep spur, containing the honey, inaccesssible to any but a few large insects; and towards this spur all the lines on the petals converge. Sir John Lubbock observes that without such conventional marks to guide them, bees would waste a great deal of time in bungling about the mouths of flowers; for they are helpless, blundering things at an emergency, and never know their way twice to the same place if any change has been made in the disposition of the familiar surroundings.
Finally, there remains the question why have some flowers green petals? This is a difficult problem to attack at the end of a long paper; and indeed it is one of little interest for ninety-nine people out of a hundred; since the flowers with green petals are mostly so small and inconspicuous that nobody but a professional botanist ever troubles his head about them. The larger part of the world is somewhat surprised to learn that there are such things as green flowers at all; though really they are far commoner than the showy-colored ones. Nevertheless, lest I should seem to be shirking a difficulty altogether, I shall add that I believe green petals to be in almost every case degraded representatives of earlier yellow or white ones. This belief is clean contrary to the accepted view, which represents the green, wind-fertilized blossoms as older in order of time than their colored insect-fertilized allies. Nevertheless, I think all botanists will allow that such green orgreenish flowers as the hellebores, the plantains, the lady's mantle, the saladburner, the moschatel, the twayblade, and the parsley-piert are certainly descended from bright-hued ancestors, and have lost their colors on their petals though acquiring the habit of wind-fertilization or self-fertilization. Starting from these, I can draw no line as I go downward in the scale through such flowers as knawel, goosefoot, dog's mercury, nettle, and arrowgrass, till I get to absolutely degraded blossoms like glasswort, callitriche, and pondweed, whose real nature nobody but a botanist would ever suspect. Whether the catkins, the grasses, and the sedges were ever provided with petals I do not venture to guess; but certainly wherever we find the merest rudiment of a perianth I am compelled to believe that the plant has descended from brightcolored ancestors, however remotely. And when we look at the very de I graded blossoms of the spurges, which we know by the existence of intermediate links to be derived from perianthbearing forefathers, the possibility at least of this being also true of catkins and grasses cannot be denied. So far as I can see, the conifers and cycads are the only flowering plants which we can be quite sure never possessed colored and attractive petals. But this digression is once more only intended for the scientificallyminded reader.
If the general principle here put for ward is true, the special colors of different flowers are clue to no mere spontaneous accident, nay, even to no meaningless caprice of the fertilizing insects. They are due in their inception to a regular law of progressive modification : and they have been fixed and stereotyped in each species by the selective action of the proper beetles, bees, moths, or butterflies. Not only can we say why such a color, once happening to appear, has been favored in the struggle for existence, but also why that color should ever make its appearance in the first place, which is a condition precedent to its being favored or selected at all. For example, blue pigments are often found in the most highly developed flowers, because blue pigments are a natural product of high modification — a simple chemical outcome of certain extremely complex biological changes. On the other hand, bees show a marked taste for bit*. because blue is the color of the most advanced flowers and by always selecting such where possible, they both keep up and sharpen their own taste, and at the same time give additional opportunities to the blue flowers, which thus ensure proper fertilization. I believe it ought always to be the object of naturalists in this manner to show not only why such and such a "spontaneous" variation should have been favored whenever it occurred, but also to show why and how it could ever have occurred at all.
- Grant Allen.
From The Cornhill Magazine.
Before me, as I write, stands a small specimen vase, containing a little Scotch bluebell, picked upon a bleak, open moorside, yet wonderfully delicate and fragile in stem, and leaf, and bud, and blossom. For the bluebells of Scotland, the bluebells of Walter Scott and of all the old ballad poetry, are not our stiff, thickstemmed English wild hyacinths, but the same dainty, drooping flowers which we in the south call harebells. The word ought really to be heather-bell; but the corruption is quite in accordance with a common law of English phonology, which has similarly degraded several other early words by dropping out the th between two vowels. Harebell or heather-bell or bluebell, the flower is one of our prettiest and most graceful native forms; and the exquisite depth of its color has always made it a prime favorite with our poets and our children alike. How it first got that beautiful color is the problem which I wish, if possible. to settle to-day.
I am not going to inquire at present why the harebell is colored at all. That question I suppose everybody has now heard answered a dozen times over at least. We all know nowadays that the colors of flowers are useful to them in attracting the insects which fertilize their embryo seeds; and that only those flowers possess bright hues which thus depend upon insects for the impregnation of their ovules. Wind - fertilized blossoms, in which the pollen of one head is carried by chance breezes to the stigma of another, are always small, green, and comparatively inconspicuous. It is only those plants which are indebted to bees or butterflies for the due setting of their seeds that ever advertise their store of honey by bright-hued petals. All this, as I say, we have each of us heard long ago. So the specific question which I wish to attack to-day is not why the harebell is colored, but why it is colored blue. And, in getting at the answer to this one test-question, I hope incidentally to answer the wider question why any given flower whatsoever should be blue, let us say, or red, or lilac, rather than orange, yellow, white, or any other possible color in nature except the one which it actually happens to be.
Briefly put, the general conclusion at which I have arrived is this: all flowers were in their earliest form yellow; then, some of them became white; after that, a few of them grew to be red or purple; and finally a comparatively small number acquired various shades of lilac, mauve, violet, or blue. So that, if this principle be true, the harebell will represent one of the most highly developed lines of descent; and its ancestors will have passed successively through all the intermediate stages. Let us see what grounds can be given for such a belief.
In the first place, it is well to observe that when we speak of the colors of flowers we generally mean the color of the petals alone. For in most cases the stamens and other central organs, which form, botanically speaking, the really important part of the blossom, are yellow. or at least yellowish; while the petals may be blue, red, pink, orange, lilac, or even green. But as the central organs are comparatively small, whereas the petals are large and conspicuous, we naturally speak of flowers in everyday talk as having the color of their petals, which form by far the greater and most noticeable part of their whole surface. Our question, then, narrows itself down to this — Why are the petals in any particular blossom of one color rather than another?
Now petals, as I have more than once already explained to the readers of this magazine, are in all probability originally I enlarged and flattened stamens, which have been set apart for the special work of attracting insects. It seems likely that i all flowers at first consisted of the central organs alone — that is to say, the pistil, which contains the ovary with its embryo seeds; and the stamens, which produce the pollen, whose cooperation is necessary in order to fertilize these same embryo ovules and to make the pistil mature into the ripe fruit. But in those plants which took to fertilization by means of insects — or, one ought rather to say, in those plants which insects took to visiting for the sake of their honey or pollen, and so unconsciously fertilizing — the flowers soon began to produce an outer row of barren and specialized stamens, adapted by their size and color for attracting the fertilizing insects; and these barren and specialized stamens are what we commonly call petals. Any flowers which thus presented brilliant masses of color to allure the eyes of the beetles, the bees, and the butterflies would naturally receive the greatest number of visits from their insect friends, and would therefore stand the best chance of setting their seeds, as well as of producing healthy and vigorous offspring as the result of a proper cross. In this way, they would gain an advantage in the struggle for life over their less fortunate compeers, and would hand down their own peculiarities to their descendants after them.
* In a part of this article I shall have to go over ground already considered in a valuable paper read by Sir John Lubbock before the British Association at York last August, and I shall take part of my examples from his interesting collection of facts as reported in Nature. But, at the same time. I should like at the outset to point out that I venture to differ on two points from his great authority. In the first place, I do not think all flowers were originally green, because I believe petals were first derived from altered stamens, not from altered sepals or bracts, and that modern green flowers are degraded types, not survivals of early forms. And in the second place. I think yellow petals preceded white petals in the order of time, and not vice versa. I may also perhaps be excused for adding that I had already arrived at most of the substantive conclusions set forth in this article before the appearance of Sir John Lubbock's paper, and bad incidentally put forward the greater part of them, though dogmatically and without fully stating my reasons, in an article on the "Daisy's Pedigree," published in the Cornhill Magazine, and in another on the "Rose family," published in Belgaria, both for August, 1881. At the same time, must express my indebtness for many new details to Sir John Lubbock's admirable paper. Of course this note is only appended for the behoof of scientific readers. But as the stamens of almost all flowers, certainly of all the oldest and simplest flowers, are yellow, it would naturally follow that the earliest petals would be yellow too. When the stamens of the outer row were flattened and broadened into petals, there would be no particular reason why they should change their color; and, in the absence of any good reason, they doubtless retained it as before. Indeed, I shall try to show, a little later on, that the earliest and simplest types of existing flowers are almost always yellow, seldom white, and never blue; and this in itself would he a sufficient ground for believing that yellow was the original color of all petals.* But as I am personally somewhat heretical, in believing, contrary to the general run of existing scientific opinion, that petals are derived from flattened stamens, not front simplified and attenuated leaves, I shall venture to detail here the reasons for this belief; because it seems to me of capital importance in connection with our present subject. For if the petals were originally a row of stamens set apart for the function of attracting insects, it would be natural and obvious why they should begin by being yellow; but if they were originally a set of leaves, which became thinner and more brightly colored for the sante purpose, it would be difficult to see why they should first have assumed any one color rather than another.
The accepted doctrine as to the nature of petals is that discovered by Wolff and afterwards rediscovered by Goethe, after whose name it is usually called; for of course, as in all such cases, the greater man's fame has swallowed up the fame of the lesser. Goethe held that all the parts of the flower were really modified leaves, and that a gradual transition could be traced between them, from the ordinary leaf through the stemleaf and the bract to the sepal (or division of the calyx), the petal, the stamen, and the ovary or carpel. Now, if we look at most modern flowers, such a transition can undoubtedly be observed; and sometimes it is very delicately graduated. so that you can hardly say where each sort of leaf merges into the next. But, unfortunately for the truth of the theory as ordinarily understood, we now know that in the earliest flowers there were no petals or sepals. but that primitive flowering plants had simply leaves on the one hand, and stamens and ovules on the other. The oldest types of flowers at present surviving, those of the pine tribe and of the tropical cycads (such as the wellknown zamias of our conservatories), have still only these simple elements. But if petals and sepals are later in origin (as we know them to be) than stamens and carpels, we cannot say, it seems to me, that they mark the transition from one form to the other, any more than we can say that Gothic architecture i marks the transition from the Egyptian style to the classical Greek. I do not mean to deny that the stamen and the ovary are themselves by origin modified leaves — that part of the Wolffian theory is absolutely irrefutable — but what I do mean to say is this, that, with the light shed upon the subject by the modern doctrine of evolution, we can no longer regard petals and sepals as intermediate stages between the two. The earliest flowering plants had true leaves on the one hand, and specialized pollen-bearing or ovule-bearing leaves on the other hand, which latter are what we call stamens and carpels; but they had no petals at all. and the petals of modern flowers have been produced at some later period. I believe, also, they have been produced by a modification of certain external stamens, not by a modification of true leaves. Instead of being leaves arrested on their way towards becoming stamens, they are stamens which have partially reverted towards the condition of leaves. They differ from true leaves, however, in their thin, spongy texture, and in the bright pigments with which they are adorned.
All stamens show a great tendency easily to become petaloid, as the technical botanists call it; that is to say, to flatten out their filament or stalk, and finally to lose their pollen-bearing sacs or anthers. In the waterlilies — which are one of the oldest and simplest types of flowers we now possess, still preserving many antique points of structure unchanged — we can trace a regular gradation from the perfect stamen to the perfect petal. In the centre of the flower, we find stamens of the ordinary sort. w ith rounded stalks or filaments, and long, yellow anthers full of pollen at the end of each; then, as we move outward, we find the filaments growing flatter and broader, and the pollensacs less and less perfect; next we find a few stamens which look exactly like petals, only that they have two abortive anthers stuck awkwardly on to their summits; and, finally, we find true petals, broad and flat, yellow or white as the case may be, and without any trace of the anthers at all. Here in this very ancient flower we have stereotyped for us as it were, the mode in which stamens first developed into petals, under stress of insect selection.
* I must add that i do not in the least doubt the tee, of Wohlff's great generalisation in the way in which he meant it — the existence of a homology between the leaf and all the floral organs; I only mean that the conception requires to be modified a little by the light later evolutionary discoveries. "But how do you know," some one may ask, "that the transition was not in the opposite direction? How do you know that the waterlily had not petals alone to start with, and that these did not afterwards develop, as the Wolffian hypothesis would have us believe, into stamens "Well, for a very simple reason. The theory of Wolff and Goethe is quite in compatible with the doctrine of development, at least if accepted as a historical explanation (which Wolff and Goethe of course never meant it to be). Flowers can and do exist without petals, which are no essential part of the organism, but a mere set of attractive colored advertise. ments for alluring insects; but no flower can possibly exist without stamens, which are one of the two essential reproductive organs in the plant. Without pollen. no flower can set its seeds. A parallel from the animal world will make this immediately obvious. Hive-bees consist of three kinds the queens or fertile females, the drones or males, and the workers or neuters. Now it would be absurd to ask whether the queens were developed from an original class of neuters, or the neuters from an original class of fertile females. Neuters left to themselves would die out in a single generation: they are really sterilized females, set apart for a special function on behalf of the hive. It is just the same with petals: they are sterilized stamens, set apart for the special function of attracting insects on be. half of the entire flower. But to ask which came first, the petals or the stamens, is as absurd as to ask which came first, the male and female bees or the neuters.*
In many other cases besides the waterlily, we know that stamens often turn into petals. Thus the numerous colored rays of the mesembryantheinums or ice-plant family are acknowledged to be flattened stamens. In double roses and almost all other double flowers the extra petals are produced from the stamens of the interior. In short, stamens generally can be readily converted into petals, especially in rich and fertile soils or under cultivation. Even where stamens always retain their pollensacs, they have often broad, flattened, petaloid filaments, as in the star of Bethlehem and many other flowers. Looking at the question as a whole, we can sec how petals might easily have taken their origin from stamens, while it is difficult to understand how they could have taken their origin from ordinary leaves — a process of which if it ever took place, no hint now remains to us. We shall see hereafter that the manner in which certain outer florets in the compound flower-heads of the daisy or the aster have been sterilized and specialized for the work of attraction, affords an exact analogy to the manner in which it is here suggested that certain stamens may at an earlier date have been sterilized and specialized for the same purpose, thus giving rise to what we know as petals.
We may take it for granted, then (to return from this long but needful digression), that the earliest petals were derived from flattened stamens, and were therefore probably yellow in color, like the stamens from which they took their origin. The question next arises — How did some of them afterwards come to be orange, red, purple, or blue?
A few years aco, when the problem of the connection Between flowers and insects still remained much in the state where Sprengel left it at the end of the last century, it would have seemed quite impossible to answer this question. But nowadays, after the full researches of Darwin. Wallace, Lubbock, and Hermann Müller into the subject, we can give a very satisfactory solution indeed. We now know, not only that the colors of flowers as a whole are intended to attract insects in general, but that certain colors are definitely intended to attract certain special kinds of insects. Thus, to take a few examples only out of hundreds that might be cited, the flowers which lay themselves out for fertilization by miscellaneous small flies are almost always white; those which depend upon the beetles are generally yellow; while those which bid for the favor of bees and butterflies are usually red, purple, lilac, or blue. Certain insects always visit one species of flower alone; and others pass from blossom to blossom of one kind only on a single day, though they may vary a little from kind to kind as the season advances, and one species replaces another. Muller, the most statistical of naturalists, has noticed that while bees form seventy-five per cent. of the insects visiting the very developed composites, theyform only fourteen per cent. of those visiting umbelliferous plants, which have, as a rule, open but by no means showy white flowers. Certain blossoms which lay themselves out to attract wasps are, as he quaintly puts it, "obviously adapted to a less zesthetically cultivated circle of visitors." And some livid red flowers actually resemble in their color and odor decaying raw meat, thus inducing bluebottle flies to visit them and so carry their pollen from head to head.
Down to the minutest distinctions between species, this correlation of flowers to the tastes of their particular guests seems to hold good. Hermann Muller notes that the common galium of our heaths and hedges is white, and therefore visited by small flies; while the lady's bedstraw. its near relative, is yellow, and owes its fertilization to little beetles. Mr. H. O. Forbes counted on one occasion the visits he saw paid to the flowers on a single bank; and he found that a particular bumblebee sucked the honey of thirty purple deadnettles in succession, passing over without notice all the other plants in the neighborhood; two other species of bumblebee and a cabbage butterfly also patronized the same deadnettles exclusively. Fritz Muller noticed a lantana in South America which changes color as its flowering advances; and he observed that each kind of butterfly which visited it stuck rigidly to its own favorite color, waiting to pay its addresses until that color appeared. Mr. Darwin cut off the petals of a lobelia and found that the hive-bees never went near it, though they were very busy with the surrounding flowers. But perhaps Sir John Lubbock's latest experiments on bees are the most conclusive of all. lie had long ago convinced himself, by trials with honey placed on slips of glass above yellow, pink, or blue paper, that bees could discriminate the different colors; and he has now shown in the same way that they display a marked preference for blue over all others. The fact is, blue flowers arc, as a rule, specialized for fertilization by bees, and bees therefore prefer this color; while conversely the flowers have at the same time become blue because that was the color which the bees prefer. As in most other cases, the adaptation must have gone on pari passu on both sides. As the beeflowers grew bluer, the bees must have grown fonder and fonder of blue; and as they grew fonder of blue, they must have more and more constantly preferred the bluest flowers.
We thus see how the special tastes of insects may have become the selective agency for developing white, pink, red, purple, and blue petals from the original yellow ones. But before they could exercise such a selective action, the petals must themselves have shown some tendency to vary in certain fixed directions. How could such an original tendency arise? For, of course, if the insects never saw any pink, purple, or blue petals, they could not specially favor and select them; so that we are as yet hardly nearer the solution of the problem than ever.
Here Mr. Sorby, who has chemically studied the coloring matter of leaves and flowers far more deeply than any other investigator, supplies us with a useful hint. lie tells us that the various pigments of bright petals are already contained in the ordinary tissues of the plant, whose juices only need to be slightly modified in chemical constitution in order to make them into the blues, pinks, and purples with which we are so familiar. "The colored substances in the petals," he says, "are in many cases exactly the same as those in the foliage from which chlorophyll has disappeared; so that the petals are often exactly like leaves which have turned yellow and red in autumn, or the very yellow or red leaves of early spring." " The color of many crimson, pink, and red flowers is due to the development of substances belonging to the erythrophyll group, and not unfrequently to exactly the same kind as that so often found in leaves. The facts seem to indicate that these various substances may be due to an alteration of the normal constituents of leaves. So far as I have been able to ascertain, their development seems as if related to extra oxidization, modified by light and other varying conditions not yet understood."
The different hues assumed by petals are all thus, as it were, laid up beforehand in the tissues of the plant, ready to be brought out at a moment's notice. And all flowers, as we know, easily sport a little in color. But the question is, do their changes tend to follow any regular and definite order? Is there any reason to believe that the modification runs from yellow through red to blue, rather than vice versa? I believe there is; and we get hints of it in the following fashion.
One of our common little English forget-me-nots, by name Myosotis versicolor (may I be pardoned for using a few scientific names just this once?) is pale yellow when it first opens; but as it grows older, it becomes faintly pinkish, and ends by being blue like the others of its race. Now, this sort of colorchange is by no means uncommon; and in all the cases that I know of it is always in the same direction, from yellow or white, through pink, orange, or red, to purple or blue. For example, one of the wall-flower tribe, Cheiranthus chamerleo, has at first a whitish flower, then a citronyellow, and finally emerges into red or violet. The petals of Stylidium fruticosum are pale yellow to begin with, and afterwards become light rose-colored. Au evening primrose, Œnothera tetraptera, has white flowers in its first stage and red ones at a later period of development. Cobæa scandensgoes from white to violet; Hibiscus mutabilis from white through flesh-colored to red. Fritz Muller's lantana is yellow on its first day, orange on the second, and purple on the third. The whole tribe of borages begin by being pink and end with being blue. The garden convolvulus opens a blushing white and passes into full purple. In all these and many other cases the general direction of the changes is the same. They are usually set down as due to oxidation of the pigmentary matter.
If this be so, there is a good reason why bees should be specially fond of blue, and why blue flowers should be specially adapted for fertilization by their aid. For Mr. A. R. Wallace has shown that color is most apt to appear or to vary in those parts of plants or animals which have undergone the highest amount of modification: The markings of the peacock and the argus pheasant come out upon their immensely developed secondary tail-feathers or wingplumes; the metallic hues of sunbirds and humming-birds show themselves upon their highly specialized crests, gorgets, or lappets. It is the same with the hackles of fowls, the head-ornaments of fruitpigeons, and the bills of toucans. The most exquisite colors in the insect world are those which are developed on the greatly expanded and delicately feathered wings of butterflies; and the eyespots which adorn a few species are usually found on their very highly modified swallow-tail appendages. So, too, with flowers; those which have undergone most modification have their colors most profoundly altered. In this way, we may put it down as a general rule (to be tested hereafter) that the least developed flowers are usually yellow or white; those which have undergone a little more modification are usually pink or red; and those which have been most highly specialized of any are usually purple, lilac, or blue. Absolute deep ultramarine, like that of this harebell, probably marks the highest level of all.
On the other hand, Mr. Wallace's principle also explains why the bees and but terflies should prefer these specialized colors to all others, and should therefore select the flowers which display them by preference over any less developed types. For bees and butterflies are the most highly adapted of all insects to honey seeking and flowerfeeding. They have themselves on their side undergone the largest amount of specialization for that particular function. And if the more specialized and modified flowers, which ; gradually fitted their forms and the position of their honeyglands to the forms of the bees or butterflies, showed a natural tendency to pass from yellow through pink and red to purple and blue, it would follow that the insects which were being evolved side by side with them, and which were aiding at the same time in their evolution, would grow to recognize these developed colors as the visible symbols of those flowers from which they could obtain the largest amount of honey with the least possible trouble. Thus it would finally result that the ordinary unspecialized flowers, which depended upon small insect riffraff, would be mostly left yellow or white; those which appealed to rather higher insects would become pink or red; and those which laid themselves out for bees and butterflies, the aristocrats of the arthropodous world, would grow for the most part to he purple or blue.
Now, this is very much what we actually find to be the case in nature. The simplest and earliest flowers are those with regular, symmetrical, open cups, which can be visited by any insects whatsoever; and these are in large part yellow or white. A little higher are the flowers with more or less closed cups, whose honey can only be reached by more specialized insects; and these are oftener pink or reddish. More profoundly modified are those irregular onesided flowers, which have assumed special shapes to accommodate bees or other specific
honeyseekers; and these are often purple and not infrequently blue. Highly specialized in another way are the flowers whose petals have all coalesced into a tubular corolla; and these might almost be said to be usually purple or blue. And, finally, highest of all are the flowers whose tubular corolla has been turned to one side, thus combining the united petals with the irregular shape; and these are almost invariably purple or blue. I shall proceed in the sequel to give examples.
One may say that the most profoundly modified of all existing flowers are the families of the composites, the labiates, the snapdragons, and the orchids. Now these are exactly the families in which blue and purple flowers are commonest; while in all of them, except the composites. white flowers are rare, and unmixed yellow flowers almost unknown. But perhaps the best way to test the principle will be to look at one or two families in detail, remembering of course that we can only expect approximate results, owing to the natural complexity of the conditions. Not to overburden the subject with unfamiliar names I shall seldom I go beyond the limits of our own native English flora.
The roses form a most instructive family to begin with. As a whole they are not very highly developed, since all of them have simple, open, symmetrical flowers, generally with five distinct petals. Bat of all the rose tribe, as I have endeavored to show elsewhere, the potentilla group, including our common English cinquefoils and silver-weed, seem to make up the most central, simple, and primitive members. They are chiefly low, creeping weeds, and their flowers are of the earliest pattern, without any specialization of form, or any peculiar adaptation to insect visitors. Now among the potentilla group, nearly all the blossoms are yellow, as are also those of the other early allied forms, such as agrimony and herb-bennet. Almost the only white potentillas in England are the barren strawberry and the true strawberry, which have diverged more than any other species from the norms of the race. Water-avens, how-ever, a close relative of herb-bennet. has a dusky purplish tinge and Sir John Lubbuc notes that it secretes honey, and is far oftener visited by insects than its kinsman. The bramble tribe, including the blackberry, raspberry, and dew-berry. have much larger flowers than the potentillas, and are very greatly frequented by winged visitors. Their petals are pure white, often with a pinky tinge, especially on big, well-grown blossoms. But there is one low, little-developed member of the blackberry group, the stone-bramble, with narrow, inconspicuous petals of a greenish yellow, merging into dirty white; and this humble form seems to preserve for us the transitional stage from the yellow potentilla to the true white brambles. One step higher. the cherries, apples, and pears have very large and expanded petals, white toward the centre, but blushing at the edges into rosy pink or bright red. Finally, the true roses, whose flowers are the most developed of all, have usually extremely broad pink petals (like those of our own dog-rose), which in some still bigger exotic species become crimson or damask of the deepest dye. They are more sought after by insects than any others of their family. At the same time, the roses as a whole, being a relatively simple family, with regular symmetrical flowers of the separate type, have never risen to the stage of producing blue petals. That is why our florists cannot turn out a blue rose. It is easy enough to make roses or any other blossoms vary within their own natural limits, revert to any earlier form or color through which they have previously passed; but it is difficult or impossible to make them take a step which they have never yet naturally taken. Hence florists generally find the most developed flowers are also the most variable and plastic in color; and hence, too, we can get red, pink, white, straw-colored, or yellow roses, but not blue ones. This, I believe, is the historical truth underlying De Candolle's division of flowers into a xanthic and a cyanic series.
Still more interesting, because covering a wider range of color, are the buttercup family, whose petals vary from yellow to every shade of crimson, purple, and blue. Here, the simplest and least differentiated members of the group are the common meadow buttercups, which, as everybody knows, have five open petals of a brilliant golden hue. Nowhere else is the exact accordance in color between stamens and petals more noticeable than in these flowers. There are two kinds of buttercup in England, however, which show us the transition from yellow to white actually taking place under our very eyes. These are the water crowfoot and its close ally the ivy-leaved crowfoot, whose petals are still faintly yellow toward the centre, but fade away into primrose and white as they approach the edge. The clematis and anemone, which are more highly developed, have white sepals (for the petals here are suppressed), even in our English species; and exotic kinds varying from pink to purple are cultivated in our flower-gardens. Columbines are very specialized forms of the buttercup type, both sepals and petals being brightly colored, while the former organs are produced above into long, bow-shaped spurs, each of uhich secretes a drop of honey; and various columbines accordingly range from red to purple and dark blue. Even the columbine, however, though so highly specialized, is not bilaterally but circularly symmetrical. This last and highest mode of adaptation to insect visits is found in larkspur, and still more developed in the curious monkshood. Now larkspur is usually blue, though white or red blos-soms sometimes occur by reversion; while monkshood is one of the deepest blue flowers we possess. Sir John Lubbock has shown that a particular bumble-bee (Bontbus hortorum), is the only north European insect capable of fertilizing the larkspur.
The violets are a whole family of bilateral flowers, highly adapted to fertilization by insects, and as a rule they are blue. I sere, too, however, white varieties easily arise by reversion; while one member of the group, the common pansy, is perhaps, the most variable flower in all nature.
Pinks do not display so wide a range in either direction. They begin as high up as white, and never get any higher than red or carnation. The small, undeveloped field species, such as the chick-weeds, stitchworts, and corn-spurries, have open flowers of very primitive character, and almost all of them are white. They are fertilized by miscellaneous small flies. Rut the campions and true pinks have a tubular calyx, and the petals are raised on long claws, while most of them also display special adaptations for a better class of insect fertilization in the way of fringes - or crowns on the petals. These higher kinds are generally pink or red. Our own beautiful purple English corn-cockle is a highly developed campion, so specialized that only butterflies can reach its honey with their long tongues, as the nectaries are situated at the bottom of the tube. Two other species of campion, however, show us interestingly the way in which variations of color may occur in a retrograde direction even among highly evolved forms. One of them, the day lychnis, has red, scentless flowers, opening; in the morning, and it is chiefly fertilized by diurnal butterflies. But its descendant, the night lychnis, has taken to fertilization by means of moths; and as moths can only see white flowers, it has become white, and has acquired a faint perfume as an extra attraction. Still, the change has not yet become fully organized in the species, for one may often find a night lychnis at the present time which is only pale pink, instead of being pure white.
The only other family of flowers with separate petals which I shall consider here is that of the pea-blossoms. These are all bilateral in shape, as everybody knows; but the lower and smaller species, such as the medick, lotus, and lady's fingers, are usually yellow. So also are broom and gorse. Among the mare specialized clovers, some of which are fertilized by bees alone, white, red, and purple predominate. Even with the smaller and earlier types, the most developed species, like lucerne, are likewise purple. But in the largest and most advanced types, the peas, beans, vetches, and scarlet runners, we get much brighter and deeper colors, often with more or less tinge of blue. In the sweet peas and many others, the standard frequently differs in hue from the keel or the wings — a still further advance in heterogeneity of coloration. Lupines, sain loin, everlasting pea, and wistaria are highly evolved meintiers of the same family, in which purple, lilac, mauve, or blue tints become distinctly pronounced.
When we pass on, however, to the flowers in which (as in this harebell) the petals have all coalesced into a tubular or campanulate corolla, we get even more striking results. Here, where the very shape at once betokens high modification, yellow is a comparatively rare color (especially as a ground-tone, though it often comes out in spots or patches), while purple and blue, so rare elsewhere, become almost the rule. For example, in the great family of the heaths, which is highly adapted to insect fertilization, more particularly by bees, purple and blue are the prevailing tints, so much so that, as we all have noticed a hundred times over, they often color whole tracts of hillside together. So far as I know, there are no really yellow heaths at all. The bell shaped blos-soms mark at once the position of the heaths with reference to insects; and the order, according to Mr. Bentham, supplies us with more ornamental plants than any other in the whole world.
It is the same with the families allied to my harebell here. They are, in fact, for the most part larger and handsomer blossoms of the same type as the heaths; and the greater number of them, like the hare-bell itself and the Canterbury bell, are deep blue. Rampion and sheep's bit, also blue, are clustered heads of similar blossoms. The little blue lobelia of our borders, which is bilateral as well as tubular, belongs to a closely related tribe. Not far from them are the lilac scabious, the blue devil's bit, and the mauve teasel. Amongst all these very highly evolved groups blue distinctly forms the prevalent color.
The composites, to which belong the daisies anti dandelions, also give us some extremely striking evidence. Each flower-head here consists of a number of small florets, crowded together so as to resemble a single blossom. So far as our present purpose is concerned, they fall naturally into three groups. The first is that of the dandelions and hawkweeds, with open florets, fertilized, as a rule, by very small insects; and these are generally yellow, with only a very few divergent species. The second is that of the thistleheads, visited by an immense number of insects, including the bees; and these are almost all purple, while some highly evolved species, like the cornflower or bluebottle and the true artichoke, are bright blue. The third is that of the daisies and asters, with tubular central florets and long, flattened outer rays; and these demand a closer examination here.
The central florets of the daisy tribe, as a rule, are brightE;olden; a fact which shows pretty certain),y that they are descended from a common ancestor who was also yellow. Moreover, these yellow florets are bell-shaped, and each contain a pistil and five stamens, like any other perfect flower. But the outer florets are generally sterile; and instead of being bell-shaped they are split down one side and unrolled, so as to form a long ray; while their corolla is at the same time much larger than that of the central blossoms. In short, they are sterilized members of the compound flower-head, specially set apart for the work of display; and thus they stand to the entire flower-head in the same relation as petals do to the simple original flower. The analogy between the two is complete. Just as the petal is a specialized and sterilized stamen told off to do duty as an allurer of insects for the benefit of the whole flower, sit the ray-floret is a specialized and sterilized blossom told off to do the selfsame duty for the benefit of the group of tiny flowers which make up the composite flower-head.
Now, the earliest ray-florets would naturally be bright yellow, like the tubular blossoms of the central disk from which they sprang. And to this day the ray florets of the simplest daisy types, such as the cornmarigold, the sunflower, and the ragwort, are yellow like the central flowers. In the camomile, however, the ox-eye daisy, and the mayweed, the rays have become white; and this, I think, fairly estailishes the fact that white is a higher development of color than yellow; for the change must have been made in order to attract special insects. Certainly, such a differentiation of the flowers in a single head cannot be without a good purpose. In the true daisy, again, the white rays become tipped with pink, which sometimes rises almost to rose-color and this stage is exactly analogous to rose-color; of apple-blossom, which similarly halts on the way from white petals to red. In the asters and Michaelmas daisies we get a further advance to purple, lilac, and mauve. while both in these and in the chrysanthemums true shades of blue not infrequently appear. The cinerarias of our gardeners are similar forms of highly developed groundsels from the Canary Islands.
* Our English archangels and few others are yellow. Such cases of reversion are wit uncommon, and are doubtless due to special insect selection in a retrograde direction.I must pass over the blue tubular gentians and periwinkles, with many other like cases, for I can only find room for two more families. One of these, the borage kind, has highly modified flowers, with a tube below and spreading lobes above; in addition to which most of the species possess remarkable and strongly developed appendages to the corolla, in the way of teeth, crowns, hairs, scales, parapets, or valves. Of the common British species alone, the forget-me-nots are clear sky-blue with a yellow eye; the viper's bugloss is at first reddish purple, and afterwards a deep blue; the lungwort is also dark blue; and so are the two alkanets, the true bugloss, the madwort, and the familiar borage of our claretcup, though all of them by reversion occasion' ally produce purple or white flowers. Iloundstongue is purple red, and most of the other species vary between purple and blue; indeed throughout the family most flowers are red at first and blue as they mature. Of these, borage at least is habitually fertilized by bees, and I believe the same to be partially true of many of the other species. The second highly evolved family to which I wish to draw attention is that of the labiates — perhaps the most specialized of any so far as regards insect fertilization. Not only are they tubular, but they are very bilateral and irregular indeed, displaying more modification of form than any other flowers except the orchids. Almost all of them are purple or blue. Among the bestknown English species are thyme, mint, marjoram, sage, and basil, which I need hardly say are great favorites with bees. Groundivy is bright blue; catmint, pale blue; prunella, violet purple; and common bugle, blue or fleshcolor. Many of the others are purple or purplish.* It must be added thaat in both these families the flowers are very liable to vary within the limit of the same species; and red, white, or purple specimens are common in all the normally blue kinds.
Sometimes, indeed, we may say that the new color has not yet begun to fix itself in the species, but that the hue still varies under our very eyes. Of this the little milkwort (a plant of the type with separate petals) affords an excellent example, for it is occasionally white, usually pink, and not infrequently blue; so that in all probability it is now actually in course of acquiring a new color. Much the same thing happens with the common pimpernel. Its ancestral form is probably the woodland loosestrife, which is yellow; but pimpernel itself is usually or ange red, while a blue variety is frequent on the Continent, and sometimes appears in England as well. Every botanist can add half-adozen equally good instances from his own memory.
So far I have spoken only of what the ladies would call selfcolor, as though every flower were of one unvaried hue throughout. I must now add a few words on the subject of the spots and lines which so often variegate the petals in certain species. On this subject, again, Mr. Wallace's hint is full of meaning. Everywhere in nature, he points out, spots and eyes of color appear on the most highly modified parts, and this rule applies most noticeably to the case of petals. Simple regular flowers, like the buttercups and roses, hardly ever have any spots or lines; but in very modified forms like the labiates and the orchids they are extremely common. The scrophularineous family, to which the snapdragon belongs, is one most specially adapted to insects, and even more irregular than that of the labi; ates; and here we find the most singular effects produced by dappling and mixture of colors. The simple yellow mullein, it is true, has no such spots or lines, nor have even many of the much higher blue veronicas; but in the snapdragons, the foxglove, the toadflax, the ivy-linaria, the eyebright, and the calceolarias, the intl. mate mixture of colors is very noticeable. In the allied tropical bignomas and gloxinias we see much the same distribution of hues. Many of the family are cultivated in gardens on account of their bizarre and fantastic shapes and colors. As to the orchids, I need hardly say anything about their wonderfully spotted and variegated flowers. Even in our small English kinds the dappling is extremely marked, especially upon the expanded and profoundly modified lower lip: but in the larger tropical varieties the patterns are often quaint and even startling in their extraordinary richness of fancy and apparent capriciousness of design. Mr. Darwin has shown that their adaptations to insects are more intimate and more marvellous than those of any other flowers whatsoever.
Structurally speaking, the spots and lines on petals seem to be the direct result of high modification; but functionally, as Sprengel long ago pointed out, they act as honeyguides, and for this purpose they have no doubt undergone special selection by the proper insects. Lines are comparatively rare on regular flowers, but they tend to appear as soon as the flower becomes even slightly bilateral. and they point directly towards the nectaries. The geranium family affords an excellent illustration of this law. The regular forms are mostly uniform in hue; but many of the South African pelargoniums, cultivated in gardens and hothouses, are slightly bilateral, the two upper petals standing off from the three lower ones; and these two become at once marked with dark lines, which are in sonic cases scarcely visible, and in others fairly pronounced. From this simple beginning one can trace a gradual progress in heterogeneity of coloring, till at last the most developed bilateral forms have the two upper petals of quite a different hue front the three lower ones, besides being deeply marked with belts and spots of dappled color. In the allied tropzeolurn or Indian cress (the so-called nasturtium of old-fashioned gardens, thought the plant is really no more related to the watercress and other true nasturtiums than we ourselves are to the great kangaroo) this tendency is carried still further. Here, the calyx is prolonged into a deep spur, containing the honey, inaccesssible to any but a few large insects; and towards this spur all the lines on the petals converge. Sir John Lubbock observes that without such conventional marks to guide them, bees would waste a great deal of time in bungling about the mouths of flowers; for they are helpless, blundering things at an emergency, and never know their way twice to the same place if any change has been made in the disposition of the familiar surroundings.
Finally, there remains the question why have some flowers green petals? This is a difficult problem to attack at the end of a long paper; and indeed it is one of little interest for ninety-nine people out of a hundred; since the flowers with green petals are mostly so small and inconspicuous that nobody but a professional botanist ever troubles his head about them. The larger part of the world is somewhat surprised to learn that there are such things as green flowers at all; though really they are far commoner than the showy-colored ones. Nevertheless, lest I should seem to be shirking a difficulty altogether, I shall add that I believe green petals to be in almost every case degraded representatives of earlier yellow or white ones. This belief is clean contrary to the accepted view, which represents the green, wind-fertilized blossoms as older in order of time than their colored insect-fertilized allies. Nevertheless, I think all botanists will allow that such green orgreenish flowers as the hellebores, the plantains, the lady's mantle, the saladburner, the moschatel, the twayblade, and the parsley-piert are certainly descended from bright-hued ancestors, and have lost their colors on their petals though acquiring the habit of wind-fertilization or self-fertilization. Starting from these, I can draw no line as I go downward in the scale through such flowers as knawel, goosefoot, dog's mercury, nettle, and arrowgrass, till I get to absolutely degraded blossoms like glasswort, callitriche, and pondweed, whose real nature nobody but a botanist would ever suspect. Whether the catkins, the grasses, and the sedges were ever provided with petals I do not venture to guess; but certainly wherever we find the merest rudiment of a perianth I am compelled to believe that the plant has descended from brightcolored ancestors, however remotely. And when we look at the very de I graded blossoms of the spurges, which we know by the existence of intermediate links to be derived from perianthbearing forefathers, the possibility at least of this being also true of catkins and grasses cannot be denied. So far as I can see, the conifers and cycads are the only flowering plants which we can be quite sure never possessed colored and attractive petals. But this digression is once more only intended for the scientificallyminded reader.
If the general principle here put for ward is true, the special colors of different flowers are clue to no mere spontaneous accident, nay, even to no meaningless caprice of the fertilizing insects. They are due in their inception to a regular law of progressive modification : and they have been fixed and stereotyped in each species by the selective action of the proper beetles, bees, moths, or butterflies. Not only can we say why such a color, once happening to appear, has been favored in the struggle for existence, but also why that color should ever make its appearance in the first place, which is a condition precedent to its being favored or selected at all. For example, blue pigments are often found in the most highly developed flowers, because blue pigments are a natural product of high modification — a simple chemical outcome of certain extremely complex biological changes. On the other hand, bees show a marked taste for bit*. because blue is the color of the most advanced flowers and by always selecting such where possible, they both keep up and sharpen their own taste, and at the same time give additional opportunities to the blue flowers, which thus ensure proper fertilization. I believe it ought always to be the object of naturalists in this manner to show not only why such and such a "spontaneous" variation should have been favored whenever it occurred, but also to show why and how it could ever have occurred at all.
- Grant Allen.
Neuvoja. (Ruosteenestäjä)
Kutoma- ja paperiteollisuus 5-6, 1908
Lämmintä höyrylläkin tyydytettyä ilmaa kestää seuraavasti valmistettu ja käytetty "ruosteenestäjä" erinomaisesti.
100 osaan vettä sekotetaan 10 osaa valkaisematonta 3 schellakkaa ja 3 osaa boraksia ja sekotus keitetään hyvästi kuparisessa astiassa. Tällöin saadaan siitä tasaisesti juokseva neste, joka jäähdyttyään kaadetaan pulloihin, jotka voidaan hyvästi sulkea.
Hyvästi puhtaaksi tehdyt rautaesineet sivellään sekotuksella, joka on saatu edelläolevasta nesteestä sekä öljyväristä, jota punnitaan 2 kertaa niin paljon kuin nestettä. Nämä sekotetaan hyvästi toisiinsa, jonka jälkeen rautaesineet sivellään näin saadulla maalilla.
Sekotusta on huolellisesti säilytettävä suljetussa astiassa, ja vaan silloin sekotettava öljyväriin kun sitä tahdotaan käyttää.
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Myöskin grafitista ja pellavaöljystä saa hyvän kosteutta ja happoja kestävän maalin. Tällöin sekotetaan grafitia hyvästi keitettyyn pellavaöljyyn ja saatu sekotus laimennetaan pellavaöljyllä siten, että 0,6 kiloa sekotusta kohden käytetään 1 litra öljyä. Pieni määrä schellakkaa ei ole haitaksi.
Lämmintä höyrylläkin tyydytettyä ilmaa kestää seuraavasti valmistettu ja käytetty "ruosteenestäjä" erinomaisesti.
100 osaan vettä sekotetaan 10 osaa valkaisematonta 3 schellakkaa ja 3 osaa boraksia ja sekotus keitetään hyvästi kuparisessa astiassa. Tällöin saadaan siitä tasaisesti juokseva neste, joka jäähdyttyään kaadetaan pulloihin, jotka voidaan hyvästi sulkea.
Hyvästi puhtaaksi tehdyt rautaesineet sivellään sekotuksella, joka on saatu edelläolevasta nesteestä sekä öljyväristä, jota punnitaan 2 kertaa niin paljon kuin nestettä. Nämä sekotetaan hyvästi toisiinsa, jonka jälkeen rautaesineet sivellään näin saadulla maalilla.
Sekotusta on huolellisesti säilytettävä suljetussa astiassa, ja vaan silloin sekotettava öljyväriin kun sitä tahdotaan käyttää.
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Myöskin grafitista ja pellavaöljystä saa hyvän kosteutta ja happoja kestävän maalin. Tällöin sekotetaan grafitia hyvästi keitettyyn pellavaöljyyn ja saatu sekotus laimennetaan pellavaöljyllä siten, että 0,6 kiloa sekotusta kohden käytetään 1 litra öljyä. Pieni määrä schellakkaa ei ole haitaksi.
Värjäyksen tietopuolta. (Peittavärit)
Kutoma- ja paperiteollisuus 5-6, 1908
(Jatkoa N;o 1 v. 1908.)
Tulemme nyt uuteen väriluokkaan, jotka yhteisellä nimellä kulkevat peittavärien nimellä. Tämän nimensä ne ovat saaneet siitä niiden ominaisuudesta, että ne kykenevät eri metalliyhdistysten kanssa tekemään liukenemattomia yhdistyksiä eli n. s. lakkoja. Niitä voisi sentähden yhtä hyvällä syyllä kutsua lakkaväreiksi.
Väriaineen kyky olla peittäväri ei riipu aineen kemiallisesta tehokkuudesta olla joko hapan tai emäksinen, vaan sen kemiallisen kokoumuksen laadusta. Väriaineen on tällöin rakenteeltaan oltava sellainen, että siinä olevat atomiryhmitykset kykenevät metalliyhdistyksiä itseensä sitomaan. Siksipä tavataan peittavärejä jokaisessa edellämainitussa väriluokassa. Mutta suurin määrä niitä on happamien värien luokassa. Ja erikoisen merkityksen ovat ne saaneet villan värjäyksessä, silloin kuin on kysymys saada tälle kaikkia ulkonaisia vaikutuksia vastaan pysyviä värejä. Tähän nähden ovat peittovärit voittamattomia. Myöskin silkkiin ja puuvillaan nähden on niitä käytännössä.
Peitta-aine on siis se sideaine, joka yhdistää väriaineen pysyvästi villaan tai kysymyksessä olevaan kudossyyhyn. Ja on tällaisina osina erikoisen suuren käytön saanut eri kromisuolat kuten kroirnaluna, kalibikromati, kromifluoridi y. m. Kun peittaaineista nykyään kromisuolat ovat 95% muiden käyttöön nähden, ovat entisajan ainoat peittaaineet aluminiumi- ja rautasuolat käyneet eritoten villavärjäyksessä yhä harvinaisemmiksi. Vaan erikoisissa tapauksissa on niillä silti vielä merkityksensä. Löytyy kolme eri menettelytapaa villan värjäämiseksi peittaväreillä ja on niistä eritoten viimemainittu saanut varsin suuren käytön. Nämä ovat:
1. Villa ensin peitataan metallisuolaliuoksessa ja senjälkeen värjätään eri hauteessa.
2. Villa peitataan ja värjätään samalla kertaa samassa hauteessa ja
3. Villa värjätään ensin ja sitten vasta peitataan joko samassa tai eri hauteessa.
Mikä edellä olevista menettelytavoista kulloinkin tulee kysymykseen riippuu niistä olosuhteista millaisen värjäyksen on oltava, sekä miten väriaine on liukenevainen. Jos se esim. on liukenematon veteen, tulee vaan ensimainittu kysymykseen, koska vaan peitattu villa kykenee värin hauteesta itseensä sitomaan. Jos se taasen helposti liukenee veteen ja peitattakin antaa villalle väriä, käytetään yleisimmin menettelytapaa kolme, koska sen toimeenpano on varsin mukava. Tällöin käy värjääminen seuraavasti:
Villa värjätään ensin 1 tunnin ajan liemessä, joka paitsi väriä sisältää 2-3% rikkihappoa ja kun väri on hauteen jättänyt, siihen sekotetaan joko 5-8% kromialunaa ja keitetään ½-¾ tuntia tai ½-1½% bikromatia ja keitetään ½ tuntia. Rikkihapon asemasta on usein eduksi käyttää joko etikkahappoa tai muuriaishappoa. Paitsi nimellä alizarinivärit, käyvät peittavärit kaupassa lukemattomilla nimillä, joista vaan harvoissa tapauksissa voi päättää onko peitta- tai joku muu väri kysymyksessä. Lähemmin erikoistapauksiin syventymättä olemme tällä kirjoituksellamme lyhyessä muodossa esittäneet ne ääriviivat, joilla eri käytännössä kulkevat väriluokat erottuvat toisistaan. Mitään jyrkkää rajaa, kuten edellisestä lienee käynyt selville, ei niiden väliin voi vetää, mutta selvän käsityksen saamiseksi niiden ominaisuuksista ja käytännöstä on tällainen kuitenkin välttämätöntä.
(Jatkoa N;o 1 v. 1908.)
Tulemme nyt uuteen väriluokkaan, jotka yhteisellä nimellä kulkevat peittavärien nimellä. Tämän nimensä ne ovat saaneet siitä niiden ominaisuudesta, että ne kykenevät eri metalliyhdistysten kanssa tekemään liukenemattomia yhdistyksiä eli n. s. lakkoja. Niitä voisi sentähden yhtä hyvällä syyllä kutsua lakkaväreiksi.
Väriaineen kyky olla peittäväri ei riipu aineen kemiallisesta tehokkuudesta olla joko hapan tai emäksinen, vaan sen kemiallisen kokoumuksen laadusta. Väriaineen on tällöin rakenteeltaan oltava sellainen, että siinä olevat atomiryhmitykset kykenevät metalliyhdistyksiä itseensä sitomaan. Siksipä tavataan peittavärejä jokaisessa edellämainitussa väriluokassa. Mutta suurin määrä niitä on happamien värien luokassa. Ja erikoisen merkityksen ovat ne saaneet villan värjäyksessä, silloin kuin on kysymys saada tälle kaikkia ulkonaisia vaikutuksia vastaan pysyviä värejä. Tähän nähden ovat peittovärit voittamattomia. Myöskin silkkiin ja puuvillaan nähden on niitä käytännössä.
Peitta-aine on siis se sideaine, joka yhdistää väriaineen pysyvästi villaan tai kysymyksessä olevaan kudossyyhyn. Ja on tällaisina osina erikoisen suuren käytön saanut eri kromisuolat kuten kroirnaluna, kalibikromati, kromifluoridi y. m. Kun peittaaineista nykyään kromisuolat ovat 95% muiden käyttöön nähden, ovat entisajan ainoat peittaaineet aluminiumi- ja rautasuolat käyneet eritoten villavärjäyksessä yhä harvinaisemmiksi. Vaan erikoisissa tapauksissa on niillä silti vielä merkityksensä. Löytyy kolme eri menettelytapaa villan värjäämiseksi peittaväreillä ja on niistä eritoten viimemainittu saanut varsin suuren käytön. Nämä ovat:
1. Villa ensin peitataan metallisuolaliuoksessa ja senjälkeen värjätään eri hauteessa.
2. Villa peitataan ja värjätään samalla kertaa samassa hauteessa ja
3. Villa värjätään ensin ja sitten vasta peitataan joko samassa tai eri hauteessa.
Mikä edellä olevista menettelytavoista kulloinkin tulee kysymykseen riippuu niistä olosuhteista millaisen värjäyksen on oltava, sekä miten väriaine on liukenevainen. Jos se esim. on liukenematon veteen, tulee vaan ensimainittu kysymykseen, koska vaan peitattu villa kykenee värin hauteesta itseensä sitomaan. Jos se taasen helposti liukenee veteen ja peitattakin antaa villalle väriä, käytetään yleisimmin menettelytapaa kolme, koska sen toimeenpano on varsin mukava. Tällöin käy värjääminen seuraavasti:
Villa värjätään ensin 1 tunnin ajan liemessä, joka paitsi väriä sisältää 2-3% rikkihappoa ja kun väri on hauteen jättänyt, siihen sekotetaan joko 5-8% kromialunaa ja keitetään ½-¾ tuntia tai ½-1½% bikromatia ja keitetään ½ tuntia. Rikkihapon asemasta on usein eduksi käyttää joko etikkahappoa tai muuriaishappoa. Paitsi nimellä alizarinivärit, käyvät peittavärit kaupassa lukemattomilla nimillä, joista vaan harvoissa tapauksissa voi päättää onko peitta- tai joku muu väri kysymyksessä. Lähemmin erikoistapauksiin syventymättä olemme tällä kirjoituksellamme lyhyessä muodossa esittäneet ne ääriviivat, joilla eri käytännössä kulkevat väriluokat erottuvat toisistaan. Mitään jyrkkää rajaa, kuten edellisestä lienee käynyt selville, ei niiden väliin voi vetää, mutta selvän käsityksen saamiseksi niiden ominaisuuksista ja käytännöstä on tällainen kuitenkin välttämätöntä.
Värjärin tietoa. (Kalkki.)
Kutoma- ja paperiteollisuus 5-6, 1908
(Jatk. N:o 2 v. 1908.)
Kalkkia ja sen vesiliuosta värjäri nykyään varsin vähän tarvitsee, mutta silti on se varsin tärkeä aine hänen tietopiirissään, koska siinä löytyvä metallinen osa voi aikaan saada paljon haittaa hänen työnsä onnistumisessa. Tulemme siihen sittemmin, mutta ensiksi olisi meidän päästävä selville mitä kalkki on. Kaikki tietävät sen syntyvän kalkkikivestä polttamalla, jolloin täten saatua tulosta kutsutaan poltetuksi kalkiksi erotukseksi sammutetusta kalkista, joka syntyy edellisestä vedellä.
Kalkki on yksinkertaisesti kalsiumimetallin happeuma. Kun kemisti merkitsee kalsiumimetallin kirjaimilla Ca ja hapon merkkinä on - kuten ennen jo on mainittu O, niin tulisi kalkin kemialliseksi kaavaksi Ca O. Sellaisena se on poltettua kalkkia, se tulos, joka syntyy kalkkikiveä polttaessa.
Veden yhteyteen jouduttuaan se kuumenee ja jos vettä on kylläksi, siihen liukenee. Näin saatua jauheinen aine on sammutettua kalkkia ja sen vesiliuos käy kalkkiveden nimellä. Kun veden kemiallinen kaava on H2O1 se sisältää kahta vetyä kohden 1 hapen, niin tulisi sammutetun kalkin kaava olemaan: Ca O + H2 O = Ca <OH <OH.
Siinä sen koko salaisuus. Ja jos vettä oli sammutettaessa kylläksi (noin 750 kertaa enemmän kuin kalkkia) ja näin saatu liemi siivilöidään eli suoditaan saadaan aivan kirkas neste n. s. kalkkivesi.
Keitettäessä se samenee. Se käy maitomaiseksi ja lopulta siinä asettuu valkea sakka astian pohjaan. Aivan sama ilmiö tapahtuu, jos pienellä pillillä puhalletaan siihen ilmaa keuhkoista. Mutta jos nestettä oli vähän ja puhaltamista jatketaan, hupenee syntynyt valkea sakka uudelleen. Kemistillä on tähänkin yksinkertainen selityksensä. Keuhkoissa oleva ilma sisältää hiilihappoa, joka sittemmin kalkkiveden kanssa muodostaa veteen liukenematonta liitua. Syntynyt samea neste ei siis ollut muuta kuin liitua ja vettä. Kun kemiassa hiilen merkkinä on C ja hiilihappo ei ole muuta kuin tämän palamistulos eli hapettuma tulisi hiilihapon kemialliseksi kaavaksi CO2. Tullessaan edellä esitetyn kalkkiveden eli Ca <OH <OH yhteyteen syntyy näistä:
Ca <OH <OH + CO2 = Ca CO3 + H2O joista Ca CO3 ei ole muuta kuin liitua eli siis hiilihapon kalsiumisuola. Sanoimme edellä, että se hiilihappoa lisää puhaltamalla ottaa uudelleen veteen liuetakseen. Tällöin syntyy siitä n. s. hapon hiilihappoinen suola, joka siis on veteen liukoinen. Eli toisin sanoen liitu liukenee veteen, jossa on hiilihappoa. Siinä myöskin selitys siihen, miksi jotkut vedet sisältävät liitua s. o. ovat kovia ja miten ne vettä keittämällä jälleen voidaan pehmittää. Tällöin poistuu hiilihappo ja liitu saostuu valkeana sakkana. Ja tällöin on vesi käynyt pehmeäksi.
Tällaista vettä, joka keittämällä käy pehmeäksi kutsutaan yleensä puolikovaksi vedeksi, erotukseksi pysyvästä kovasta vedestä, jonka ominaisuudet riippuvat toisista olosuhteista.
Miten peseminen kovalla vedellä ottaa luistaakseen lienee yleensä tunnettua. Kun pehmyt vesi saa saippuan hyvästi vahtaamaan, käy asia kovaa vettä käyttäessä päinvastaiseksi. Siinä oleva kalkkisuola saostaa saippuan pieninä kalkkirasvahappohiutaleina ja pesosta ei tule mitään. Paitsi saippuan hukkaa, joka tällöin syntyy, voivat samaset veteenliukenemattomat hiutaleet sittemmin asettua valkeiden pesovaatteiden pinnalle ja aikaansaada keltaisia pilkkuja. Samoin vaikuttaa kova vesi värihauteissa. Sen kalkkiyhdistykset saostavat tästä värin pieninä hiutaleina, joten väri ei voi antaa värjäystä. Ainoastaan harvoissa tapauksissa on värjärille eduksi käyttää kalkkia sisältävää vettä. Tämä tulee kysymykseen esim. n. s. turkinpunasta värjätessä. Tämä väri kun kalkista saa loistoa ja kestävyyttä. Mutta kuten sanottu, enimmissä tapauksissa vaikuttaa kova, se on kalkkipitoinen vesi värjäyksessä haitallisesti ja on sitä sentähden aina vältettävä. Pahimmassa tapauksessa on käytettävä siten, että veteen sekotetaan olosuhteiden mukaan joko etikkahappoa tai soodaa.
Kun veden saa puolikovaksi siihen liuennut liitu, syntyy n. s. pysyvä kova vesi eräästä toisesta siihen liuenneesta kalkkisuolasta nimittäin kipsistä. Tämä on kalsiumimetallin rikkihappoinen suola. Eli kuten kemistit sen merkitsevät Ca SO4. Pysyvä kova vesi ei keitettäessä pehmiä. Sen saa käyttökelpoiseksi vaan kemiallisin keinoin. Värjäyksessä ja pesossa se on yhtä mahdoton kuin puolikovavesikin. Mutta tämän lisäksi on sillä vielä eräs vähemmän hauska ominaisuus, joka tekee sen käytön höyrykattiloissa tuiki mahdottomaksi. Ja se on sen kyky luoda n. s. kattilakiveä. Sillä tämän synnyttäjänä on pääasiallisesti kipsi, joskin hiilihappoinen kalsiumi eli liitu siihen myöskin osaa ottaa.
Sanoimme edellä, että liitu vettä keitettäessä saostuu valkeana sakkana. Tätä ei kipsi tee. Se jää veteen, mutta asettuu sittemmin vettä kattilassa haihduttaessa tämän seinille kivikovaksi massaksi, joka vaan meisselillä ja vasaralla on siitä irrotettavissa.
On aikoinaan koetettu keksiä kaikenlaisia keinoja kovan veden pehmittämiseksi ja kattilakiven syntymisen estämiseksi itse kattilassa. Mutta vähemmän hyviä tuloksia ne tavallisesti antavat. Parhaimmin voidaan kattilakiven syntyminen estää, jos kova vesi ennen käyttöä pehmennetään. Tällöin sekotetaan vesisäiliöön ensin määrätty määrä kalkkivettä. Tämä saostaa vedessä löytyvät hiilihappoiset suolat pois. Kun tämä on tapahtunut pannaan siihen soodaliuosta. Tämä muuttaa kipsin liukoiseksi natriumisulfatiksi eli glaubersuolaksi ja hiilihappoinen kalsiumi saostuu. Näin syntyneiden sakkojen annetaan asettua säiliön pohjaan ja tämän yläosasta otetaan pehmihnyt vesi käytettäväksi. Tai suoditaan eri laitoksissa syntynyt sakka pois. Ellei kalkkivettä tahdota käyttää sen varomaton käyttäminen kun voi tuoda veteen uutta kalkkia sekotetaan sen asemasta veteen lipeäkiveä eli natriumihydratia ja soodaa.
Seuraa itsestään, että pysyvän kovan veden pehmittäminen vaatii hyvän tuloksen saavuttamiseksi suurta asiantuntemusta tai perinpohjaista kokeilua. Vaan veden analysoiminen antaa tarkat tiedot siitä miten paljon pehmittäjäaineita vesi pehmittyäkseen ottaa tarvitakseen.
(Jatk. N:o 2 v. 1908.)
Kalkkia ja sen vesiliuosta värjäri nykyään varsin vähän tarvitsee, mutta silti on se varsin tärkeä aine hänen tietopiirissään, koska siinä löytyvä metallinen osa voi aikaan saada paljon haittaa hänen työnsä onnistumisessa. Tulemme siihen sittemmin, mutta ensiksi olisi meidän päästävä selville mitä kalkki on. Kaikki tietävät sen syntyvän kalkkikivestä polttamalla, jolloin täten saatua tulosta kutsutaan poltetuksi kalkiksi erotukseksi sammutetusta kalkista, joka syntyy edellisestä vedellä.
Kalkki on yksinkertaisesti kalsiumimetallin happeuma. Kun kemisti merkitsee kalsiumimetallin kirjaimilla Ca ja hapon merkkinä on - kuten ennen jo on mainittu O, niin tulisi kalkin kemialliseksi kaavaksi Ca O. Sellaisena se on poltettua kalkkia, se tulos, joka syntyy kalkkikiveä polttaessa.
Veden yhteyteen jouduttuaan se kuumenee ja jos vettä on kylläksi, siihen liukenee. Näin saatua jauheinen aine on sammutettua kalkkia ja sen vesiliuos käy kalkkiveden nimellä. Kun veden kemiallinen kaava on H2O1 se sisältää kahta vetyä kohden 1 hapen, niin tulisi sammutetun kalkin kaava olemaan: Ca O + H2 O = Ca <OH <OH.
Siinä sen koko salaisuus. Ja jos vettä oli sammutettaessa kylläksi (noin 750 kertaa enemmän kuin kalkkia) ja näin saatu liemi siivilöidään eli suoditaan saadaan aivan kirkas neste n. s. kalkkivesi.
Keitettäessä se samenee. Se käy maitomaiseksi ja lopulta siinä asettuu valkea sakka astian pohjaan. Aivan sama ilmiö tapahtuu, jos pienellä pillillä puhalletaan siihen ilmaa keuhkoista. Mutta jos nestettä oli vähän ja puhaltamista jatketaan, hupenee syntynyt valkea sakka uudelleen. Kemistillä on tähänkin yksinkertainen selityksensä. Keuhkoissa oleva ilma sisältää hiilihappoa, joka sittemmin kalkkiveden kanssa muodostaa veteen liukenematonta liitua. Syntynyt samea neste ei siis ollut muuta kuin liitua ja vettä. Kun kemiassa hiilen merkkinä on C ja hiilihappo ei ole muuta kuin tämän palamistulos eli hapettuma tulisi hiilihapon kemialliseksi kaavaksi CO2. Tullessaan edellä esitetyn kalkkiveden eli Ca <OH <OH yhteyteen syntyy näistä:
Ca <OH <OH + CO2 = Ca CO3 + H2O joista Ca CO3 ei ole muuta kuin liitua eli siis hiilihapon kalsiumisuola. Sanoimme edellä, että se hiilihappoa lisää puhaltamalla ottaa uudelleen veteen liuetakseen. Tällöin syntyy siitä n. s. hapon hiilihappoinen suola, joka siis on veteen liukoinen. Eli toisin sanoen liitu liukenee veteen, jossa on hiilihappoa. Siinä myöskin selitys siihen, miksi jotkut vedet sisältävät liitua s. o. ovat kovia ja miten ne vettä keittämällä jälleen voidaan pehmittää. Tällöin poistuu hiilihappo ja liitu saostuu valkeana sakkana. Ja tällöin on vesi käynyt pehmeäksi.
Tällaista vettä, joka keittämällä käy pehmeäksi kutsutaan yleensä puolikovaksi vedeksi, erotukseksi pysyvästä kovasta vedestä, jonka ominaisuudet riippuvat toisista olosuhteista.
Miten peseminen kovalla vedellä ottaa luistaakseen lienee yleensä tunnettua. Kun pehmyt vesi saa saippuan hyvästi vahtaamaan, käy asia kovaa vettä käyttäessä päinvastaiseksi. Siinä oleva kalkkisuola saostaa saippuan pieninä kalkkirasvahappohiutaleina ja pesosta ei tule mitään. Paitsi saippuan hukkaa, joka tällöin syntyy, voivat samaset veteenliukenemattomat hiutaleet sittemmin asettua valkeiden pesovaatteiden pinnalle ja aikaansaada keltaisia pilkkuja. Samoin vaikuttaa kova vesi värihauteissa. Sen kalkkiyhdistykset saostavat tästä värin pieninä hiutaleina, joten väri ei voi antaa värjäystä. Ainoastaan harvoissa tapauksissa on värjärille eduksi käyttää kalkkia sisältävää vettä. Tämä tulee kysymykseen esim. n. s. turkinpunasta värjätessä. Tämä väri kun kalkista saa loistoa ja kestävyyttä. Mutta kuten sanottu, enimmissä tapauksissa vaikuttaa kova, se on kalkkipitoinen vesi värjäyksessä haitallisesti ja on sitä sentähden aina vältettävä. Pahimmassa tapauksessa on käytettävä siten, että veteen sekotetaan olosuhteiden mukaan joko etikkahappoa tai soodaa.
Kun veden saa puolikovaksi siihen liuennut liitu, syntyy n. s. pysyvä kova vesi eräästä toisesta siihen liuenneesta kalkkisuolasta nimittäin kipsistä. Tämä on kalsiumimetallin rikkihappoinen suola. Eli kuten kemistit sen merkitsevät Ca SO4. Pysyvä kova vesi ei keitettäessä pehmiä. Sen saa käyttökelpoiseksi vaan kemiallisin keinoin. Värjäyksessä ja pesossa se on yhtä mahdoton kuin puolikovavesikin. Mutta tämän lisäksi on sillä vielä eräs vähemmän hauska ominaisuus, joka tekee sen käytön höyrykattiloissa tuiki mahdottomaksi. Ja se on sen kyky luoda n. s. kattilakiveä. Sillä tämän synnyttäjänä on pääasiallisesti kipsi, joskin hiilihappoinen kalsiumi eli liitu siihen myöskin osaa ottaa.
Sanoimme edellä, että liitu vettä keitettäessä saostuu valkeana sakkana. Tätä ei kipsi tee. Se jää veteen, mutta asettuu sittemmin vettä kattilassa haihduttaessa tämän seinille kivikovaksi massaksi, joka vaan meisselillä ja vasaralla on siitä irrotettavissa.
On aikoinaan koetettu keksiä kaikenlaisia keinoja kovan veden pehmittämiseksi ja kattilakiven syntymisen estämiseksi itse kattilassa. Mutta vähemmän hyviä tuloksia ne tavallisesti antavat. Parhaimmin voidaan kattilakiven syntyminen estää, jos kova vesi ennen käyttöä pehmennetään. Tällöin sekotetaan vesisäiliöön ensin määrätty määrä kalkkivettä. Tämä saostaa vedessä löytyvät hiilihappoiset suolat pois. Kun tämä on tapahtunut pannaan siihen soodaliuosta. Tämä muuttaa kipsin liukoiseksi natriumisulfatiksi eli glaubersuolaksi ja hiilihappoinen kalsiumi saostuu. Näin syntyneiden sakkojen annetaan asettua säiliön pohjaan ja tämän yläosasta otetaan pehmihnyt vesi käytettäväksi. Tai suoditaan eri laitoksissa syntynyt sakka pois. Ellei kalkkivettä tahdota käyttää sen varomaton käyttäminen kun voi tuoda veteen uutta kalkkia sekotetaan sen asemasta veteen lipeäkiveä eli natriumihydratia ja soodaa.
Seuraa itsestään, että pysyvän kovan veden pehmittäminen vaatii hyvän tuloksen saavuttamiseksi suurta asiantuntemusta tai perinpohjaista kokeilua. Vaan veden analysoiminen antaa tarkat tiedot siitä miten paljon pehmittäjäaineita vesi pehmittyäkseen ottaa tarvitakseen.
Scientific miscellany. Antimony blue.
The Galaxy 5, (marraskuu) 1872
Antimony blue is the name of a new color, much like ultramarine, but said to be more permanent. It is prepared by dissolving metallic antimony in nitro-muriatic acid, filtering through granulated glass, and adding to the filtrate solution of yellow prussiate of potash as long as any precipitate is formed. It promises to be very useful as a coloring for artificial flowers; and mixed with chrome yellow and zinc yellow it forms fine greens, equal to those produced from arsenic, and much less poisonous. It also works well with oil varnishes, gums, glue, and starch, but is decomposed by lime. Boettger is the discoverer.
Antimony blue is the name of a new color, much like ultramarine, but said to be more permanent. It is prepared by dissolving metallic antimony in nitro-muriatic acid, filtering through granulated glass, and adding to the filtrate solution of yellow prussiate of potash as long as any precipitate is formed. It promises to be very useful as a coloring for artificial flowers; and mixed with chrome yellow and zinc yellow it forms fine greens, equal to those produced from arsenic, and much less poisonous. It also works well with oil varnishes, gums, glue, and starch, but is decomposed by lime. Boettger is the discoverer.
Maailman väriainetuotanto.
Kutomatyöläinen 3, (elokuu) 1917
Washingtonin Kauppakamari on toimittanut tutkimuksen maailman väriainetuotannosta. Tutkimuksen mukaan arvioidaan yhteinen tuotannon arvo 92,15 miljoonaksi dollariksi. Tästä jakaantuu eri valtioiden osalle seuraavat määrät:
Saksan ... 68,30 milj. doll.
Sveitsin ... 6,45 " "
Ranskan ... 5,00 " "
Amerikan ... 3,00 " "
Itävallan ... 1,50 " "
Venäjän ... 1,00 " "
Belgian ... 0,50 " "
Hollannin ... 0,20 " "
Muiden maiden osalle ... 0,20 " "
Ylläolevat numerot osoittavat että Saksa todella hallitsee maailman tuotantoa väriteollisuudenalalla, jotenka on hyvin ymmärrettävissä miten äärettömiä vaikeuksia eri maat saavat kokea tyydyttäessään edes jossakin määrin tarvettaan ilman Saksan apua.
Washingtonin Kauppakamari on toimittanut tutkimuksen maailman väriainetuotannosta. Tutkimuksen mukaan arvioidaan yhteinen tuotannon arvo 92,15 miljoonaksi dollariksi. Tästä jakaantuu eri valtioiden osalle seuraavat määrät:
Saksan ... 68,30 milj. doll.
Sveitsin ... 6,45 " "
Ranskan ... 5,00 " "
Amerikan ... 3,00 " "
Itävallan ... 1,50 " "
Venäjän ... 1,00 " "
Belgian ... 0,50 " "
Hollannin ... 0,20 " "
Muiden maiden osalle ... 0,20 " "
Ylläolevat numerot osoittavat että Saksa todella hallitsee maailman tuotantoa väriteollisuudenalalla, jotenka on hyvin ymmärrettävissä miten äärettömiä vaikeuksia eri maat saavat kokea tyydyttäessään edes jossakin määrin tarvettaan ilman Saksan apua.
The Spectroscope as a Detective.
Manufacturer and builder 12, 1876
The most usual application of the spectroscope consists in observing the luminous bands or lines in the spectra of the flames of different combustible bodies, or of bodies introduced into a flame; and as those lines differ for each element or compound, it gives a ready means to the chemist to determine what substances he has to deal with, providing they are only volatile enough to affect the flame and he can produce a flame or heat of sufficiently high temperature.
This subject has already been explained on page 68 of our March number for 1870, to which we refer the reader for details, and we will only add that since that time this method has been applied to the heavenly bodies, and it has been shown not only that sun and stars owe their bright luminosity to an exceedingly high temperature, but it has even been proved what the chemical nature of the substances is, which are in such a bright incandescent state as to illuminate the universe.
Another application of the spectroscope is to intercept the ordinary day, sun, or lamp light before passing it through the instrument, by placing in front of the same a glass vessel containing a colored liquid the nature of which it is desired to investigate. One of the simplest means is to place the liquid in a test-tube, and suspend this in front of the slit of the instrument, as represented in the adjoined engraving; the light passing through the liquid, undergoes a kind of filtration; some rays are absorbed, and being unable to reach the instrument, manifest their absence by broad dark bands in the spectrum, which otherwise shows all the colors in their regular order, which are red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet, and lavender.
If, for instance, in this way various red solutions are examined — say a solution of carmin, of anilin red, of sulpho-cyanid of iron, a decoction of Brazil wood, etc., they will, notwithstanding the colors may be so much alike as to make it difficult to distinguish one from the other, show in the spectrums mentioned various absorption lines; they all will, of course, absorb more of the yellow, green, and blue than of the red, orange, and violet; but the parts absorbed, and their extent or the width of the dark bands, will differ in each in such a characteristic way as to leave no doubt about their nature; also the brightness and extent of the colors not absorbed will differ, some will show a larger and some a lesser part of the violet or lavender, and in others this color will also he absorbed and only the red shown, with or without the orange. If blood is largely diluted with water, the liquid shows a yellow tinge, while it is easy to make a similar shade with gumboge or saffron; however, when compared in the way described and illustrated in our figure, the blood will show two characteristic dark bands in the yellow and green, which no other substance will show. It is evident that this may be quite important in legal investigations.
Another method is to look through the spectroscope at a strongly illuminated color. The best for this purpose is where a small spectroscope is attached to the microscope in the form of an eye-piece. Also by this method the material of colors may be recognized from one another, which it otherwise would be impossible to distinguish without destroying the material in order to make a chemical analysis.
We have in a former number referred to a case where we proved by these means, before a court of justice, that two signatures were both made by an ink of Prussian blue, thus upsetting the claim that the inks were different.
Without the spectroscope the only means by which to settle this matter would be to apply chemical reagents to the signature in question, and thus destroy perhaps part of them. Thus, for instance, to distinguish a signature iu indigo blue ink from one written with Prussian blue, a drop of sulphuric acid would show the difference, as it obliterates the Prussian blue and not the indigo. The spectroscope however demonstrated the identity of the two inks without any injury whatsoever to the papers in dispute.
Other colored inks may be also thus distinguished, but not a deep black, as this is properly not a color, and absorbs all the rays equally, whether it be India ink, iron ink, chromate of potash ink, lampblack, etc.
The most usual application of the spectroscope consists in observing the luminous bands or lines in the spectra of the flames of different combustible bodies, or of bodies introduced into a flame; and as those lines differ for each element or compound, it gives a ready means to the chemist to determine what substances he has to deal with, providing they are only volatile enough to affect the flame and he can produce a flame or heat of sufficiently high temperature.
This subject has already been explained on page 68 of our March number for 1870, to which we refer the reader for details, and we will only add that since that time this method has been applied to the heavenly bodies, and it has been shown not only that sun and stars owe their bright luminosity to an exceedingly high temperature, but it has even been proved what the chemical nature of the substances is, which are in such a bright incandescent state as to illuminate the universe.
Another application of the spectroscope is to intercept the ordinary day, sun, or lamp light before passing it through the instrument, by placing in front of the same a glass vessel containing a colored liquid the nature of which it is desired to investigate. One of the simplest means is to place the liquid in a test-tube, and suspend this in front of the slit of the instrument, as represented in the adjoined engraving; the light passing through the liquid, undergoes a kind of filtration; some rays are absorbed, and being unable to reach the instrument, manifest their absence by broad dark bands in the spectrum, which otherwise shows all the colors in their regular order, which are red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet, and lavender.
If, for instance, in this way various red solutions are examined — say a solution of carmin, of anilin red, of sulpho-cyanid of iron, a decoction of Brazil wood, etc., they will, notwithstanding the colors may be so much alike as to make it difficult to distinguish one from the other, show in the spectrums mentioned various absorption lines; they all will, of course, absorb more of the yellow, green, and blue than of the red, orange, and violet; but the parts absorbed, and their extent or the width of the dark bands, will differ in each in such a characteristic way as to leave no doubt about their nature; also the brightness and extent of the colors not absorbed will differ, some will show a larger and some a lesser part of the violet or lavender, and in others this color will also he absorbed and only the red shown, with or without the orange. If blood is largely diluted with water, the liquid shows a yellow tinge, while it is easy to make a similar shade with gumboge or saffron; however, when compared in the way described and illustrated in our figure, the blood will show two characteristic dark bands in the yellow and green, which no other substance will show. It is evident that this may be quite important in legal investigations.
Another method is to look through the spectroscope at a strongly illuminated color. The best for this purpose is where a small spectroscope is attached to the microscope in the form of an eye-piece. Also by this method the material of colors may be recognized from one another, which it otherwise would be impossible to distinguish without destroying the material in order to make a chemical analysis.
We have in a former number referred to a case where we proved by these means, before a court of justice, that two signatures were both made by an ink of Prussian blue, thus upsetting the claim that the inks were different.
Without the spectroscope the only means by which to settle this matter would be to apply chemical reagents to the signature in question, and thus destroy perhaps part of them. Thus, for instance, to distinguish a signature iu indigo blue ink from one written with Prussian blue, a drop of sulphuric acid would show the difference, as it obliterates the Prussian blue and not the indigo. The spectroscope however demonstrated the identity of the two inks without any injury whatsoever to the papers in dispute.
Other colored inks may be also thus distinguished, but not a deep black, as this is properly not a color, and absorbs all the rays equally, whether it be India ink, iron ink, chromate of potash ink, lampblack, etc.
Kannas voidaan kaunistaa kannakselaisin väriainein.
Käkisalmen Sanomat 89, 10.8.1939
Marttojen ja maataloustuottajain sihteerit, maanviljelysseuran rakennustoimiston edustajat ja lehtimiehet katselemassa Kannaksen kylien maalaamis- ja siistimistarvetta.
Isänmaan kasvojen kaunistaminen on tullut päivän iskusanaksi, vuoden ajankohtaisimmaksi asiaksi lähinnä olympialaisten jälkeen. Siitä on puhuttu ja kirjoitettu niin paljon viime aikoina, että ei varmaankaan ole yhtään ainoata suomalaista, joka ei olisi kuullut siitä mitään mainittavan. Mutta asia vaatiikin ennenkaikkea juuri sitä, ettei kukaan jää sille vieraaksi. Siisteydestään ulkomailla kuulu ja tästä hiukan ylpeilevä Suomen kansa on todennut saavansa vieraita ensi vuonna oikein kosolti ja herännyt huomaamaan, että sen ympäristössä on monta kohtaa, jotka eivät erikoisemmin korosta mainittua ominaisuutta. Ja se on päättänyt tehdä sen, mitä vielä tehtävissä on, puhumisesta ja kirjoittamisesta siirtyä toimintaan.
Kevään kuluessa perustettiin eri puolille maata toimikuntia ja kaunistamiskomiteoja. Korkeat viranomaiset havaitsivat asian hyväksi ja hyödylliseksi ja ryhtyivät toimimaan sen hyväksi. Länsi-Suomessa, Turun, Uudenmaan ja Hameen lääneissä onkin edistytty aimo askelin. Rakennuksia on korjailtu ja maalattu, takapihat siistitty ja aletaan jo katsella metsiä puhdistettavaksi. Kerrotaanpa maaherra Kytän itse heiluneen innostuneena pensseli kädessä. Maaherra Kyttä oli muuten ensimmäisiä, jotka ottivat asian omakseen. Mutta eipä Karjalakaan ole jäänyt jälkeen. Kunnostamistoimikunta on meilläkin ja työ on jo täydessä käynnissä.
Kesäkuun 6 p:ksi kutsui Karjalan maatalouskerhopiiriliitto koolle asianharrastajain kokouksen käsittelemään Karjalan maaseudun rakennusten maalausta ja sen yhteydessä olevia asioita. Kokouksessa oli edustajia lääninhallituksesta ja osuustoiminnallisista, maataloudellisista ja valistusjärjestöistä. Kokouksen puheenjohtaja, maaherra Arvo Manner avasi kokouksen, jossa perustettiin Karjalan maaseudun kunnostamistoimikunta. Toimikunnan puheenjohtajaksi valittiin maaherra Manner, varapuheenjohtajaksi vuorineuvos Kotilainen ja sihteeriksi maatalouskerhopiiriliiton sihteeri agronoomi Antti Sokka ja muiksi jäseniksi kauppaneuvos Bremer, talousneuvos Pitkänen, konsuli Leskinen, johtaja Hyvärinen, johtaja Viiding, johtaja Mänttäri, metsähoitaja Varjus, konsulentti Manja Haltia, maisteri Viikki, konsulentti Kivivuori, maanviljelijä Pusa, toimittaja Montonen ja piirisihteeri Ahokas. Toimikunta on pitänyt useita kokouksia, joissa "kasvojen pesua ja maalausta" on käsitelty ja se on jakautunut kolmeen jaostoon, propaganda-, rahankeräys- ja teknilliseen jaostoon, joista kukin pitää huolta omaan alaansa kuuluvista tehtävistä. Toimikunta ja jaostot ovat ryhtyneet jo monipuolisiin käytännöllisiin toimenpiteisiin. Puheenjohtaja, maaherra Manner on lähettänyt kunnille ja maatalous- ja osuustoiminta[]laisilleen kiertokirjeitä, joissa on kehoitettu kaikin tavoin toimimaan kaunistamisasian edistämiseksi, sanomalehtiartikkelit kuuluvat myös propagandajaoston toimialaan. Lähiaikoina aiotaan järjestää radiolähetys, jossa maaherra Mannerin kuullaan selostavan suunnitelmia ja saavutuksia maakunnan kaunistamisessa. Erikoista huomiota on kiinnitetty ja kiinnitetään täällä Karjalassa juuri rakennusten maalaamiseen ja pihojen siistimiseen takapihojakaan unohtamatta. Pellonojapensaikot on jyrkästi päätetty raivata pois ja tienvieriet, aidat ja tienvarsimetsät korjata ja kunnostaa.
Kaunistamistoimikunnan propagandajaosto, konsulentti Manja Haltia, agr. Sokka ja konsulentti Kivivuori, tekivät elokuun alussa kiertomatkan maakuntaamme nähdäkseen miten pitkälle asiassa on päästy ja perehtyäkseen uusiin seikkoihin, jotka kipeästi korjausta kaipaisivat. Heidän retkensä alkoi Viipurista ja jatkui Terijoen, Raudun ja Kiviniemen kautta Käkisalmeen, josta edelleen Sortavalaan, Imatralle, Lappeenrantaan, Kouvolaan. Kotkaan, Haminaan ja takaisin Viipuriin, Heidän käydessään Käkisalmessa oli lehtemme edustajalla tilaisuus lähemmin tutustua heidän havaintoihinsa ja näkemyksiinsä maakunnan kasvoista.
Ensimmäinen havainto oli, että työtä riittää yllinkyllin. Maalia tarvitaan vielä paljon ja maalaajia myös. Ei olisi lainkaan hullumpaa, jos täälläkin kerholaiset, kuten he muualla Suomessa ovat tehneet, ottaisivat maalatakseen pieneläjien ja köyhien mökit. Niin köyhää ei juuri liene, joka ei voisi hankkia niitä muutamaa maalikiloa, jotka maalaamiseen tarvitaan ja jotka kuntien ja liikkeiden myöntämien avustusten ja alennuksien turvin eivät tule todellakaan kalliiksi, varsinkin, jos sitten saa ne aivan ilmaiseksi sivellyksi mökkinsä pintaan. Agronoomi Sokka kertoi Lapissa käydessään hämmästykseksensä todenneensa, että siellä olivat talot melkein järjestään hauskasti punamullalla sivellyt ja nurkkalaudat valkoisiksi aina Kuusamon ja Petsamon perimmäisiä sopukoita myöten, mikä meistä karjalaisista tuntui oudolta verratessamme omaa maakuntaamme tähän. Vain muutamat vanhat riihet, joiden pihkainen honkapinta oli auringonpaisteessa saanut harvinaisen kauniin ruskehtavankultaisen värin, on jätetty maalaamatta. Siinä on makua! Tähän on pyrittävä meilläkin, sillä semmoisten ajan patinoimien vanhojen aittarakennusten, riihien ja saunojen maalaaminen olisi suorastaan rikos.
Maakuntamme harmaus tuntui melkein toivottomalta ja rakennusten rikkinäisyys auttamattomalta. Kivennavalla käydessä todettiin, että pitäjän varmaankin kauneimmalla paikalla oli pitäjän rumin röttelö, jonkinlainen sahantapainen, nurkat kallellaan, ovet vinossa ja kaikki rempallaan. Mutta iloisia poikkeuksiakin tavattiin. Lipolan ja Sakkolan pitäjät ovat aivan esimerkillisen kauniita ja siistejä. Siitä huolimatta juuri näissä pitäjissä on kaunistusaate saanut, vankimman jalansijan. Sakkolassa on kunta suhtautunut erinomaisella ymmärtämyksellä asiaan ja sen myöntämien turvin on voitu tähän mennessä tehdä 17.000 maalikilon tilaus. Sakkolan Petäjärvellä tutustuttiin lisäksi ainutlaatuiseen ilmiöön, "värikaivoon", josta saadaan kelta, puna- ja ruskomultaa sekä sinimaata. Sen olemassaolo on kyllä tiedetty jo kauemmin, mutta vasta äskettäin on se otettu käytäntöön. Myyriä lienee lähinnä kiittäminen siitä, että maaperän erikoisuus tuli päivänvaloon. Maan tekee väriaineeksi sopivaksi saveen yhtynyt rautapitoinen suomalmi, joka saa saven syvemmältä keltaiseksi, mutta pintakerroksissa se oksidoituu ruskeaksi. Polttamalla saadaan tästä sitten punaista väriainetta. Kaivos on erään järven rannasta n. ½ km. päässä eräässä notkossa. Värimultaa on siinä n. 4 m. paksuudella ja enemmänkin. Kaivon äärellä on polttolaitos ja kuivauslavoja maalijauhon valmistamista varten, ja liettamislaitos, jossa ruskea pintamulta on lietettävä puhtaaksi. Petäjärven asemalla on sähköllä toimiva mylly, jonka kautta kaikki värimulta kulkee. Siellä jauhetaan se tomuhienoksi ja säkitetään. Näitä väriaineita onkin myyty ympäri Suomea aina Petsamoa myöten. Laadultaan ne ovat parasta, mitä Suomesta on löydetty, kevyitä, kaunisvärisiä ja voittavat näissä suhteissa ulkomaiset tuotteetkin. Lisäksi ne sisältävät harvinaisen paljon rautaoksidia ja niitä käytettäessä tarvitaan huomattavasti vähemmän vernissaa kuin ulkomaitten tuotteilla maalattaessa. Hinnaltaankin nämä ovat niitä halvempia.
Tarmokkaisiin toimenpiteisiin on siis ryhdyttyjä tuloksiakin alkaa jo olla näkyvissä. Mutta paljon en vielä tehtävä, ennenkuin nurkkamme punastumatta kestävät suuren vieraspaljouden arvostelevat katseet ja ennenkuin voimme itse sanoa tehneemme kaiken voitavamme siisteyden suhteen. Useimmassa tapauksessahan ei ole kysymys ainoastaan "kaunistamisesta", vaan välttämättömistä korjauksilta, joita "ei vain ole tullut aikanaan tehdyksi". Mutta ponnekkaalla työllä ehkä vielä ehdimme saada maakuntamme semmoiseen kuntoon, että olympialaisvieraat ja maailman metsäkongressin jäsenet, jotka myös ensi kesänä tulevat maahamme tutustumaan, ovat näkemään tyytyväisiä ja pitävät edelleen meitä siistinä kansana, mikä ei suinkaan ole vähäinen tunnustus maastamme ja kansamme luonteesta.
Marttojen ja maataloustuottajain sihteerit, maanviljelysseuran rakennustoimiston edustajat ja lehtimiehet katselemassa Kannaksen kylien maalaamis- ja siistimistarvetta.
Isänmaan kasvojen kaunistaminen on tullut päivän iskusanaksi, vuoden ajankohtaisimmaksi asiaksi lähinnä olympialaisten jälkeen. Siitä on puhuttu ja kirjoitettu niin paljon viime aikoina, että ei varmaankaan ole yhtään ainoata suomalaista, joka ei olisi kuullut siitä mitään mainittavan. Mutta asia vaatiikin ennenkaikkea juuri sitä, ettei kukaan jää sille vieraaksi. Siisteydestään ulkomailla kuulu ja tästä hiukan ylpeilevä Suomen kansa on todennut saavansa vieraita ensi vuonna oikein kosolti ja herännyt huomaamaan, että sen ympäristössä on monta kohtaa, jotka eivät erikoisemmin korosta mainittua ominaisuutta. Ja se on päättänyt tehdä sen, mitä vielä tehtävissä on, puhumisesta ja kirjoittamisesta siirtyä toimintaan.
Kevään kuluessa perustettiin eri puolille maata toimikuntia ja kaunistamiskomiteoja. Korkeat viranomaiset havaitsivat asian hyväksi ja hyödylliseksi ja ryhtyivät toimimaan sen hyväksi. Länsi-Suomessa, Turun, Uudenmaan ja Hameen lääneissä onkin edistytty aimo askelin. Rakennuksia on korjailtu ja maalattu, takapihat siistitty ja aletaan jo katsella metsiä puhdistettavaksi. Kerrotaanpa maaherra Kytän itse heiluneen innostuneena pensseli kädessä. Maaherra Kyttä oli muuten ensimmäisiä, jotka ottivat asian omakseen. Mutta eipä Karjalakaan ole jäänyt jälkeen. Kunnostamistoimikunta on meilläkin ja työ on jo täydessä käynnissä.
Kesäkuun 6 p:ksi kutsui Karjalan maatalouskerhopiiriliitto koolle asianharrastajain kokouksen käsittelemään Karjalan maaseudun rakennusten maalausta ja sen yhteydessä olevia asioita. Kokouksessa oli edustajia lääninhallituksesta ja osuustoiminnallisista, maataloudellisista ja valistusjärjestöistä. Kokouksen puheenjohtaja, maaherra Arvo Manner avasi kokouksen, jossa perustettiin Karjalan maaseudun kunnostamistoimikunta. Toimikunnan puheenjohtajaksi valittiin maaherra Manner, varapuheenjohtajaksi vuorineuvos Kotilainen ja sihteeriksi maatalouskerhopiiriliiton sihteeri agronoomi Antti Sokka ja muiksi jäseniksi kauppaneuvos Bremer, talousneuvos Pitkänen, konsuli Leskinen, johtaja Hyvärinen, johtaja Viiding, johtaja Mänttäri, metsähoitaja Varjus, konsulentti Manja Haltia, maisteri Viikki, konsulentti Kivivuori, maanviljelijä Pusa, toimittaja Montonen ja piirisihteeri Ahokas. Toimikunta on pitänyt useita kokouksia, joissa "kasvojen pesua ja maalausta" on käsitelty ja se on jakautunut kolmeen jaostoon, propaganda-, rahankeräys- ja teknilliseen jaostoon, joista kukin pitää huolta omaan alaansa kuuluvista tehtävistä. Toimikunta ja jaostot ovat ryhtyneet jo monipuolisiin käytännöllisiin toimenpiteisiin. Puheenjohtaja, maaherra Manner on lähettänyt kunnille ja maatalous- ja osuustoiminta[]laisilleen kiertokirjeitä, joissa on kehoitettu kaikin tavoin toimimaan kaunistamisasian edistämiseksi, sanomalehtiartikkelit kuuluvat myös propagandajaoston toimialaan. Lähiaikoina aiotaan järjestää radiolähetys, jossa maaherra Mannerin kuullaan selostavan suunnitelmia ja saavutuksia maakunnan kaunistamisessa. Erikoista huomiota on kiinnitetty ja kiinnitetään täällä Karjalassa juuri rakennusten maalaamiseen ja pihojen siistimiseen takapihojakaan unohtamatta. Pellonojapensaikot on jyrkästi päätetty raivata pois ja tienvieriet, aidat ja tienvarsimetsät korjata ja kunnostaa.
Kaunistamistoimikunnan propagandajaosto, konsulentti Manja Haltia, agr. Sokka ja konsulentti Kivivuori, tekivät elokuun alussa kiertomatkan maakuntaamme nähdäkseen miten pitkälle asiassa on päästy ja perehtyäkseen uusiin seikkoihin, jotka kipeästi korjausta kaipaisivat. Heidän retkensä alkoi Viipurista ja jatkui Terijoen, Raudun ja Kiviniemen kautta Käkisalmeen, josta edelleen Sortavalaan, Imatralle, Lappeenrantaan, Kouvolaan. Kotkaan, Haminaan ja takaisin Viipuriin, Heidän käydessään Käkisalmessa oli lehtemme edustajalla tilaisuus lähemmin tutustua heidän havaintoihinsa ja näkemyksiinsä maakunnan kasvoista.
Ensimmäinen havainto oli, että työtä riittää yllinkyllin. Maalia tarvitaan vielä paljon ja maalaajia myös. Ei olisi lainkaan hullumpaa, jos täälläkin kerholaiset, kuten he muualla Suomessa ovat tehneet, ottaisivat maalatakseen pieneläjien ja köyhien mökit. Niin köyhää ei juuri liene, joka ei voisi hankkia niitä muutamaa maalikiloa, jotka maalaamiseen tarvitaan ja jotka kuntien ja liikkeiden myöntämien avustusten ja alennuksien turvin eivät tule todellakaan kalliiksi, varsinkin, jos sitten saa ne aivan ilmaiseksi sivellyksi mökkinsä pintaan. Agronoomi Sokka kertoi Lapissa käydessään hämmästykseksensä todenneensa, että siellä olivat talot melkein järjestään hauskasti punamullalla sivellyt ja nurkkalaudat valkoisiksi aina Kuusamon ja Petsamon perimmäisiä sopukoita myöten, mikä meistä karjalaisista tuntui oudolta verratessamme omaa maakuntaamme tähän. Vain muutamat vanhat riihet, joiden pihkainen honkapinta oli auringonpaisteessa saanut harvinaisen kauniin ruskehtavankultaisen värin, on jätetty maalaamatta. Siinä on makua! Tähän on pyrittävä meilläkin, sillä semmoisten ajan patinoimien vanhojen aittarakennusten, riihien ja saunojen maalaaminen olisi suorastaan rikos.
Maakuntamme harmaus tuntui melkein toivottomalta ja rakennusten rikkinäisyys auttamattomalta. Kivennavalla käydessä todettiin, että pitäjän varmaankin kauneimmalla paikalla oli pitäjän rumin röttelö, jonkinlainen sahantapainen, nurkat kallellaan, ovet vinossa ja kaikki rempallaan. Mutta iloisia poikkeuksiakin tavattiin. Lipolan ja Sakkolan pitäjät ovat aivan esimerkillisen kauniita ja siistejä. Siitä huolimatta juuri näissä pitäjissä on kaunistusaate saanut, vankimman jalansijan. Sakkolassa on kunta suhtautunut erinomaisella ymmärtämyksellä asiaan ja sen myöntämien turvin on voitu tähän mennessä tehdä 17.000 maalikilon tilaus. Sakkolan Petäjärvellä tutustuttiin lisäksi ainutlaatuiseen ilmiöön, "värikaivoon", josta saadaan kelta, puna- ja ruskomultaa sekä sinimaata. Sen olemassaolo on kyllä tiedetty jo kauemmin, mutta vasta äskettäin on se otettu käytäntöön. Myyriä lienee lähinnä kiittäminen siitä, että maaperän erikoisuus tuli päivänvaloon. Maan tekee väriaineeksi sopivaksi saveen yhtynyt rautapitoinen suomalmi, joka saa saven syvemmältä keltaiseksi, mutta pintakerroksissa se oksidoituu ruskeaksi. Polttamalla saadaan tästä sitten punaista väriainetta. Kaivos on erään järven rannasta n. ½ km. päässä eräässä notkossa. Värimultaa on siinä n. 4 m. paksuudella ja enemmänkin. Kaivon äärellä on polttolaitos ja kuivauslavoja maalijauhon valmistamista varten, ja liettamislaitos, jossa ruskea pintamulta on lietettävä puhtaaksi. Petäjärven asemalla on sähköllä toimiva mylly, jonka kautta kaikki värimulta kulkee. Siellä jauhetaan se tomuhienoksi ja säkitetään. Näitä väriaineita onkin myyty ympäri Suomea aina Petsamoa myöten. Laadultaan ne ovat parasta, mitä Suomesta on löydetty, kevyitä, kaunisvärisiä ja voittavat näissä suhteissa ulkomaiset tuotteetkin. Lisäksi ne sisältävät harvinaisen paljon rautaoksidia ja niitä käytettäessä tarvitaan huomattavasti vähemmän vernissaa kuin ulkomaitten tuotteilla maalattaessa. Hinnaltaankin nämä ovat niitä halvempia.
Tarmokkaisiin toimenpiteisiin on siis ryhdyttyjä tuloksiakin alkaa jo olla näkyvissä. Mutta paljon en vielä tehtävä, ennenkuin nurkkamme punastumatta kestävät suuren vieraspaljouden arvostelevat katseet ja ennenkuin voimme itse sanoa tehneemme kaiken voitavamme siisteyden suhteen. Useimmassa tapauksessahan ei ole kysymys ainoastaan "kaunistamisesta", vaan välttämättömistä korjauksilta, joita "ei vain ole tullut aikanaan tehdyksi". Mutta ponnekkaalla työllä ehkä vielä ehdimme saada maakuntamme semmoiseen kuntoon, että olympialaisvieraat ja maailman metsäkongressin jäsenet, jotka myös ensi kesänä tulevat maahamme tutustumaan, ovat näkemään tyytyväisiä ja pitävät edelleen meitä siistinä kansana, mikä ei suinkaan ole vähäinen tunnustus maastamme ja kansamme luonteesta.
27.3.20
Chap. XIII. Secrets relative to the art of taking out spots and stains.
Valuable Secrets concerning Arts and Trades:
or Approved Directions, from the best Artists, for the Various Methods...
Printed by Thomas Hubbard,
Norwich, 1795I. To take off iron-molds from linen.
Put boiling water into a bowl and spread the stained part, or parts, of your linen over it, so as to let it be well penetrated with the steam of the water. Then rub the places with sorrel's juice and salt till they are perfectly and thoroughly shaked with it. Such linen washed afterwards in the lye of wood-ashes, will be found to return intirely free from the iron mold spots it had before.
II. To take off carriage-wheel's grease from clothes.
Rub the place with butter. Then with blotting paper and a hot iron, or a bit of red hot charcoals in a silver spoon, you may take all off as you would a drop of wax or tallow on a cloth.
III. Against piss-spots.
Boil some chamberlye and wash the place with it. Then rinse it with clear water.
IV. To take off all sorts of spots from cloth of whatever colour it may be.
Take half a pound of crude honey, the yolk of a new laid egg, and the bulk of a nut of ammoniac salt. Mix all well together, and put some on the spots which happen to be on either silk or cloth. After having left it there a while, wash the place with clean water, and the spot will disappear.
V. A general receipt against all sorts of spots, upon every sort of stuff.
A water impregnated wtith alkaline salt, black soap and bullock's gall, takes off extremely well the greasy spots from any cloth or silk stuff.
VI. Against oil-spots.
Take a piece of white soap which you shave very fine and put in a quart bottle with a wide mouth and neck, half filled with lye. Add to this the bulk of a nut of ammoniac salt, two yolks of eggs, cabbage-juice and bullock's gall a discretionable quantity, and in short one ounce of salt of tartar in subtile powder sifted. Stop the bottle well, shake it and expose it to a south sun for four days. After that time, if you pour off that liquor on any oil spot and rub it well with it in and outlide, then let it dry, and wash it again with clear water, or again with the following composition of soap, that spot will entirely disappear.
VII. A washing-ball to take off spots.
Take fuller's earth, or soft soap which mix and incorporate with vine brush ashes, white chalk, alum and tartar pounded all together in a mortar and lifted through a very fine silk sieve. When all us made into a paste, form your balls with it and it them dry in the made. To use them, rub any spotted place with it and wash it afterwards with clear water.
VIII. To take out pitch and turpentine spots.
Rub well the spot with oil of olive, which set to dry for one day and one night. Then, with warm water and the above washing ball, you will entirely ungrease the place.
IX. Against ink-spots, whether on cloth or linen.
Wet immediately the place with lemon's, or sorrel's juice, or with white soap diluted in vinegar.
X. Another mere simple remedy against ink spilled.
Prejudice always did, and alway will, prove fatal from the minutest to the most interesting circumstane in life. The time which is spent in lamenting over an accident, just happened before our own eyes, is but too often the easy one which could have saved and prevented the dire consequeaces of it, nay perhaps repaired it intirely without leaving the least fear behind, had we ran instantly to the remedy. Ink never does nor can spoil the cloth, stuff, silk, lace, or linen on which it is spilled, unless it lies there to driness. And it is well known, on the other hand, that if you put as much water in your ink-horn, as there is ink, you make it too pale: if twice, still more so: if three, four, five, fix, if twenty if fifty times; then it will be such indeed that it will be no more ink at all. What could a pint of ink do in a quart of milk? a great deal of mischief without doubt. But, in 50 or a 100 gallons nothing; at all. By parity of reasoning it must be obvious that if on the finest silk, cloth or velvet, muslin or lace ruffles, &c. a whole phial of ink mould be spilled, an undeterminate greater quantity of water than there was ink, poured instantly on the place, by degrees and not all at once, must weaken it to such a degree as to wash it off at last intirely. What reasoning thus once dictated naturally, reiterated experience since proved: therefore, here it is recommended. Sense only and judgment must be consulted in the execution. As for example, if the ink be spilled on a ruffle or apron, &c. while you have it on, let one hold the affected part between his two hands over a bason and rub it while another is pouring gradually water from a decanter; and let a whole pitcherful be used if necessary. If the ruffle, apron, &c. be at liberty and not actually worn on, the place dipped in to a bason filled with water, and there squeezed and dipped in again, may do; provided you change the water in abundance, every two or three squeezes. If the ink be spilled on a green carpet table, it may immediately be taken out with a tea spoon so dexterously that any water at all shall hardly be wanted afterwards, provided it has not laid any time on it, and was only that instant spilled; as the down of the cloth prevents the immediate soaking of the ink or any liquor indeed (except oil) through and through. But if it have laid some time, let the time be ever so longs provided it is still wet, by pouring a little fresh clean water at a time on the place, and gathering it up each time with a spoon, and pressing hard to squeeze it out of the cloth into the spoon again, you will at last bring it to its natural colour as if no such accident had ever happened. These few circumstances explained, are sufficient to guide any one, who has a common share of good sense and undestanding, how to act on this principle in others.
XI. Against oil spots on satin, and other silk-stuffs, even on paper.
If the spot is fresh and just done, heat on, the shovel some,ashes from calcined sheep's troters, and put some under and upon the place. Then, laying something heavy upon it, let it remain so for one night; the next morning the spot ought to be gone: but, if not quite, renew the precept.
XII. A preparation of balls against spots.
Take half a pound of soap, four ounces of clay, and one of quick lime. Dilute all with a little water, and make it into pills or small balls. With these rub the spots, and wash the place afterwards.
XIII. For silks.
If you rub the spots which are upon a silk with spirit of turpentine, they will disappear: because the volatility of that spirit exhaling into vapour, carries along with it the oil of the spot to which, on account of its homogeneous quality, it communicates its volatility, by penetrating and subdividing it infinitely.
XIV. To restore gold and silver laces to their former beauty.
Mix equal quantities of water, bullock's and jack's gall. With this composition rub your gold or silver and you will see it changing colour directly.
XV. To restore Turkey carpets to their first bloom.
Beat the carpet well first with a rod, till perfectly free from dust. Then, if there be any spot of ink, take them out with a lemon, or with sorrel, and wash the place afterwards with clear water. Shake the rest of the water off, and let it dry where you rubbed it with any. When dry, rub the carpet very hard all over with the smoaking hot crum of a white loaf: and, when you find in the evening, the skies clear aed a likelyhood of being a fine night, let the carpet be put out for two or three such nights.
XVI. To make tapestries resume their first brightness, when their colours have been tarnished and spoiled.
Shake and clean well the tapestry by rubbing it all ever with white chalk which you leave on it for about one day. Next, with a rough hair brush, get all that chalk out again, and put on fresh, which leave as before. Then with the same rough hair brush get this out also, and beat it foundly with a rod and brush it afterwards with the soft cloth-brush. This operation will restore a tapestry to its pristine state.
XVII. To take off all the spots of wax from velvet of any colour, except the crimson.
Take the crum of a stale loaf, and cut a thick slice out fit, which toast, and apply, while burning hot, on the spot of wax; when cooled, renew it till all the wax is soaked out of the velvet.
XVIII. To take the same off from silks and camblet.
Put on each wax spot, some soft soap, and set in the sun till grown warm; then, by washing the place with clean water, the spot will disappear.
XIX. To wash a gold or silver, or silk embroidery, on either linen, or any stuff whatever, and render it like new.
Take bullock's gall, one pound; soap and honey, three ounces of each; and Florentine orrice, about the same quantity in subtile powder. Put all in a glass vessel, in which mix it well, into a paste, and let it be exposed for ten days in the sun. When you are ready to use it make an infusion of bran, which boil in water and strain through a cloth. Then smear the work over with the above-described paste, in such places as you want to clean, and wash them afterwards with the said bran water, renewing this till it receives no more alteration in its colour. Wipe then well the places with a white cloth; and wrap the work in a clean napkin to set it in the sun to dry, after which pass it through the polishing and lustring press, and the work will be ast fine and bright as when new.
XX. To take the spots off from silk and woollen stuffs.
Take French starch, without any mixture of indigo or blue whatever, which dilute in a cup with good brandy, like a thick pap. Of this paste, put on each spot, and, when dry, rub it off and brush it. If the spot is not quite gone at the first time, renew the operation, and it certainly will at the second.
XXI. To colour velvet in red.
Take four ounces of adragant, and one of Arabick gums, both of which pulverise. Put this powder in clean water, wherein let it dissolve for two or three days. After which time, steep a sponge in the liquor, and rub the wrong side of the velvet. If, after being dry, you find it not high-coloured enough, renew it and the effect will surprise you.
XXII. To revive the colour of a cloth.
Pour one quart of water on one pound of burnt potashes. Twelve hours after decant the water off in another vessel, and put in a handful of dry moth-mullein's leaves, with two bullocks galls. Boil all together till the leaves go to the bottom. Then set this water for a few days in the sun. Then putting in it whatever colour you want, boil it along with the cloth in that lye, and let it thus soak afterwards for fourteen or fifteen days, then the cloth will have resumed its primary colour.
XXIII. To take the spots of from a white cloth.
Boil two ouness of alum for half an hour, in a pint or a pint and a-half of water; then put in a piece of white soap, with another pound of alum; and, having soaked thus three days in the cold, you may with it, wash all the spots of any white cloth whatever.
or Approved Directions, from the best Artists, for the Various Methods...
Printed by Thomas Hubbard,
Norwich, 1795I. To take off iron-molds from linen.
Put boiling water into a bowl and spread the stained part, or parts, of your linen over it, so as to let it be well penetrated with the steam of the water. Then rub the places with sorrel's juice and salt till they are perfectly and thoroughly shaked with it. Such linen washed afterwards in the lye of wood-ashes, will be found to return intirely free from the iron mold spots it had before.
II. To take off carriage-wheel's grease from clothes.
Rub the place with butter. Then with blotting paper and a hot iron, or a bit of red hot charcoals in a silver spoon, you may take all off as you would a drop of wax or tallow on a cloth.
III. Against piss-spots.
Boil some chamberlye and wash the place with it. Then rinse it with clear water.
IV. To take off all sorts of spots from cloth of whatever colour it may be.
Take half a pound of crude honey, the yolk of a new laid egg, and the bulk of a nut of ammoniac salt. Mix all well together, and put some on the spots which happen to be on either silk or cloth. After having left it there a while, wash the place with clean water, and the spot will disappear.
V. A general receipt against all sorts of spots, upon every sort of stuff.
A water impregnated wtith alkaline salt, black soap and bullock's gall, takes off extremely well the greasy spots from any cloth or silk stuff.
VI. Against oil-spots.
Take a piece of white soap which you shave very fine and put in a quart bottle with a wide mouth and neck, half filled with lye. Add to this the bulk of a nut of ammoniac salt, two yolks of eggs, cabbage-juice and bullock's gall a discretionable quantity, and in short one ounce of salt of tartar in subtile powder sifted. Stop the bottle well, shake it and expose it to a south sun for four days. After that time, if you pour off that liquor on any oil spot and rub it well with it in and outlide, then let it dry, and wash it again with clear water, or again with the following composition of soap, that spot will entirely disappear.
VII. A washing-ball to take off spots.
Take fuller's earth, or soft soap which mix and incorporate with vine brush ashes, white chalk, alum and tartar pounded all together in a mortar and lifted through a very fine silk sieve. When all us made into a paste, form your balls with it and it them dry in the made. To use them, rub any spotted place with it and wash it afterwards with clear water.
VIII. To take out pitch and turpentine spots.
Rub well the spot with oil of olive, which set to dry for one day and one night. Then, with warm water and the above washing ball, you will entirely ungrease the place.
IX. Against ink-spots, whether on cloth or linen.
Wet immediately the place with lemon's, or sorrel's juice, or with white soap diluted in vinegar.
X. Another mere simple remedy against ink spilled.
Prejudice always did, and alway will, prove fatal from the minutest to the most interesting circumstane in life. The time which is spent in lamenting over an accident, just happened before our own eyes, is but too often the easy one which could have saved and prevented the dire consequeaces of it, nay perhaps repaired it intirely without leaving the least fear behind, had we ran instantly to the remedy. Ink never does nor can spoil the cloth, stuff, silk, lace, or linen on which it is spilled, unless it lies there to driness. And it is well known, on the other hand, that if you put as much water in your ink-horn, as there is ink, you make it too pale: if twice, still more so: if three, four, five, fix, if twenty if fifty times; then it will be such indeed that it will be no more ink at all. What could a pint of ink do in a quart of milk? a great deal of mischief without doubt. But, in 50 or a 100 gallons nothing; at all. By parity of reasoning it must be obvious that if on the finest silk, cloth or velvet, muslin or lace ruffles, &c. a whole phial of ink mould be spilled, an undeterminate greater quantity of water than there was ink, poured instantly on the place, by degrees and not all at once, must weaken it to such a degree as to wash it off at last intirely. What reasoning thus once dictated naturally, reiterated experience since proved: therefore, here it is recommended. Sense only and judgment must be consulted in the execution. As for example, if the ink be spilled on a ruffle or apron, &c. while you have it on, let one hold the affected part between his two hands over a bason and rub it while another is pouring gradually water from a decanter; and let a whole pitcherful be used if necessary. If the ruffle, apron, &c. be at liberty and not actually worn on, the place dipped in to a bason filled with water, and there squeezed and dipped in again, may do; provided you change the water in abundance, every two or three squeezes. If the ink be spilled on a green carpet table, it may immediately be taken out with a tea spoon so dexterously that any water at all shall hardly be wanted afterwards, provided it has not laid any time on it, and was only that instant spilled; as the down of the cloth prevents the immediate soaking of the ink or any liquor indeed (except oil) through and through. But if it have laid some time, let the time be ever so longs provided it is still wet, by pouring a little fresh clean water at a time on the place, and gathering it up each time with a spoon, and pressing hard to squeeze it out of the cloth into the spoon again, you will at last bring it to its natural colour as if no such accident had ever happened. These few circumstances explained, are sufficient to guide any one, who has a common share of good sense and undestanding, how to act on this principle in others.
XI. Against oil spots on satin, and other silk-stuffs, even on paper.
If the spot is fresh and just done, heat on, the shovel some,ashes from calcined sheep's troters, and put some under and upon the place. Then, laying something heavy upon it, let it remain so for one night; the next morning the spot ought to be gone: but, if not quite, renew the precept.
XII. A preparation of balls against spots.
Take half a pound of soap, four ounces of clay, and one of quick lime. Dilute all with a little water, and make it into pills or small balls. With these rub the spots, and wash the place afterwards.
XIII. For silks.
If you rub the spots which are upon a silk with spirit of turpentine, they will disappear: because the volatility of that spirit exhaling into vapour, carries along with it the oil of the spot to which, on account of its homogeneous quality, it communicates its volatility, by penetrating and subdividing it infinitely.
XIV. To restore gold and silver laces to their former beauty.
Mix equal quantities of water, bullock's and jack's gall. With this composition rub your gold or silver and you will see it changing colour directly.
XV. To restore Turkey carpets to their first bloom.
Beat the carpet well first with a rod, till perfectly free from dust. Then, if there be any spot of ink, take them out with a lemon, or with sorrel, and wash the place afterwards with clear water. Shake the rest of the water off, and let it dry where you rubbed it with any. When dry, rub the carpet very hard all over with the smoaking hot crum of a white loaf: and, when you find in the evening, the skies clear aed a likelyhood of being a fine night, let the carpet be put out for two or three such nights.
XVI. To make tapestries resume their first brightness, when their colours have been tarnished and spoiled.
Shake and clean well the tapestry by rubbing it all ever with white chalk which you leave on it for about one day. Next, with a rough hair brush, get all that chalk out again, and put on fresh, which leave as before. Then with the same rough hair brush get this out also, and beat it foundly with a rod and brush it afterwards with the soft cloth-brush. This operation will restore a tapestry to its pristine state.
XVII. To take off all the spots of wax from velvet of any colour, except the crimson.
Take the crum of a stale loaf, and cut a thick slice out fit, which toast, and apply, while burning hot, on the spot of wax; when cooled, renew it till all the wax is soaked out of the velvet.
XVIII. To take the same off from silks and camblet.
Put on each wax spot, some soft soap, and set in the sun till grown warm; then, by washing the place with clean water, the spot will disappear.
XIX. To wash a gold or silver, or silk embroidery, on either linen, or any stuff whatever, and render it like new.
Take bullock's gall, one pound; soap and honey, three ounces of each; and Florentine orrice, about the same quantity in subtile powder. Put all in a glass vessel, in which mix it well, into a paste, and let it be exposed for ten days in the sun. When you are ready to use it make an infusion of bran, which boil in water and strain through a cloth. Then smear the work over with the above-described paste, in such places as you want to clean, and wash them afterwards with the said bran water, renewing this till it receives no more alteration in its colour. Wipe then well the places with a white cloth; and wrap the work in a clean napkin to set it in the sun to dry, after which pass it through the polishing and lustring press, and the work will be ast fine and bright as when new.
XX. To take the spots off from silk and woollen stuffs.
Take French starch, without any mixture of indigo or blue whatever, which dilute in a cup with good brandy, like a thick pap. Of this paste, put on each spot, and, when dry, rub it off and brush it. If the spot is not quite gone at the first time, renew the operation, and it certainly will at the second.
XXI. To colour velvet in red.
Take four ounces of adragant, and one of Arabick gums, both of which pulverise. Put this powder in clean water, wherein let it dissolve for two or three days. After which time, steep a sponge in the liquor, and rub the wrong side of the velvet. If, after being dry, you find it not high-coloured enough, renew it and the effect will surprise you.
XXII. To revive the colour of a cloth.
Pour one quart of water on one pound of burnt potashes. Twelve hours after decant the water off in another vessel, and put in a handful of dry moth-mullein's leaves, with two bullocks galls. Boil all together till the leaves go to the bottom. Then set this water for a few days in the sun. Then putting in it whatever colour you want, boil it along with the cloth in that lye, and let it thus soak afterwards for fourteen or fifteen days, then the cloth will have resumed its primary colour.
XXIII. To take the spots of from a white cloth.
Boil two ouness of alum for half an hour, in a pint or a pint and a-half of water; then put in a piece of white soap, with another pound of alum; and, having soaked thus three days in the cold, you may with it, wash all the spots of any white cloth whatever.
Chap. VIII. Secrets relative to the art of casting in moulds.
Valuable Secrets concerning Arts and Trades:
or Approved Directions, from the best Artists, for the Various Methods...
Printed by Thomas Hubbard,
Norwich, 1795I. To cast a figure in bronze.
1. To cast a figure, or any other piece in bronze, you must, first, make a pattern with a proper clay. That clay ought to be mixed with sand, to prevent its cracking, when it comes to dry.
2. When the pattern is completed and the sculptor is pleased with his work, you mould it with plaister while it is still damp, because th drying, the parts of the pattern shrink, and lose their fullness. To that effect you begin by the bottom part of the figure, which you cover with several pieces, and by rows; as for example, let us suppose the first row from the feet to the knees; the second from the knees to the beginning of the belly; the third from the beginning of the belly up to the pit of the stomach, from thence to the shoulders, on which you lay the last row, which is to contain the head - Observe, how ever, that those divisions of rows admit of no particular rule, and ought to be intirely determined by, and adapted to, the size of the figure. For when the pieces are made too considerable, the plaister works too much, and fatigues itself, which is detrimental to its taking a true and precise impression of all the turns and shapes of the figure. So that at any rate, it is always preferable to make the pieces of the mould smaller than larger.
3. You must observe, that if the figure you are moulding have got any draperies, or other sorts of ornaments about it which require a good deal of trouble and nicety, you cannot help making a great many small parts and subdivisions in your mould, in order to enable you to strip them off the figure afterwards with more facility. In which circumstance, when all these small parts are made, and garnished with little rings to assist in pulling them off more easily, you cover them all over witg larger pieces, which containing several of the little ones, are called cases, and in French chapes.
4. When the mould is thus made and completed, you let it rest till it is perfectly dry. Then, before using it, they who are curious in their work, do not content themselves with imbibing it inwardly with oil, but they even make it drink as much wax as it can soak, by warming those separate pieces, and putting wax in them to melt. The motive, in doing this, is to render the wax-work, which is to be cast in it finer and more perfect. For if you imbibe the mould with oil only, the wax figure cast in such a mould always comes out a little rough and like flour, because the wax draws always the superficy of the plaister, and in reverse, the plaister draws also the superficy of the wax, which produces a great defect in the figure, and is a great obstacle to its coming out from the mould with that neatness it otherwise should.
5. The mould being therefore thus imbibed with wax, if you want it for a bronze figure, you assemble all the small parts of it each in their cases, and with a brush give them a coat of oil. Then, with another brush, give them another coat also of wax, prepared as follows. - Six pounds of wax, half-apound of hog's lard, and one pound of Burgundy pitch. - This preparation of the wax, however, must be regulated according to the country and the season. For in the heat of summer, or hot climes, such as Spain, Italy, and France, wax may be used alone, as it keeps naturally soft, and the other drugs above-mentioned, are added to it only to render it more traclable. Of this wax, therefore, whether prepared or natural, you lay another coat, as we said, in the hollow of the mould, to the thickness of a sixpenny piece. Then, with wax made in flat cakes, of the thickness of a quarter of an inch, more or less, according to that you are willing to give your metal, you fill all the hollow parts of the mould in pressing hard this sort of wax in them with your fingers. When thus fillet, you have an iron grate, larger by three or four inches every way than the plinth or basis of the figure. On the middle of that grate you erect one or more iron bars, contoured agreeable to the latitude and situation of the figure, and bored, from space to space, with holes to pass other iron rods of the size and length necessary to support the core (in French ame or noyau] of what you want to cast.
6. Formerly they used to make their cores with potter's clay mixed with hair and horse-durg well beaten together. With this compost, they formed a figure like the pattern; and, when they had well supported it with iron bars, length and crossways, according to its position and attitude, they scraped it, that is to say, they diminished, and took off from its bigness as much as they wanted to give to their metal. When that core was dry, they took the wax with which they had filled the hollow parts of their mould, and covered it with them. - This method is even practised row by some founders, especially for great bronze figures, because earth resists better the power of that red-hot melted metal, than plaister can; and this they reserve only for small figures, and those which are cast in gold or silver. However, when plaister is well beaten and mixed with brick dust also well beaten and sifted fine, it stands pretty well too. We shall therefore proceed on the method of casting on plaister cores.
7. You take then the first, or bottom rows, of the mould, filled by the last wax in cakes, as mentioned before, and assemble them on the iron grate round the principal iron bar, which is to support the core when made. When they are joined together, you give them a tye round very hard with cords, left they should vary from their position when you form the core.
8. To form this, as soon as the first set which completes the bottom row of the separate pieces of the mould is fixed, you pour phifter, diluted very clear, and mixed, as we said, with brick-dust, with which you fill up that bottom part of the hollow. Then, on this first bottom row of the mould, you place the second in the same manner as the first; then fill it likewise with your prepared plaister. Thus you continue to erect your mould from row to row, till you come to the last, and fill it as you go, with plaister, which is called forming the core. If the figure require it, you pass across the core some iron rods through the holes perforated forth at purpose in the perpendicular bars, in order to support the cort the better, and give it more strength and power to refill the effort of the metal when it comes in fusion upon it.
9. When all the pieces of the mould have been thus erected one upon another, and filled with plaister, yon limit stop a certain time to let it take a considence, then proceed to take off the cases and all the smaller parts of the mould contained in each of them, row by row, and one by one, in the same manner as you proceeded to erect them, with this difference, that in erecting them you begin at the bottom, and that in taking them off, you begun at the top; which, when done, leaves the figure to appear all in wax, covering the core, which is contained in the inside of it.
10. You are then to proceed to the repairing of the figure and finish it after the original. The sculptor, in that case, has even an opportunity of perfecting much some of the parts, in adding or taking off according as he thinks proper, to give more grace and expression to certain strokes, muscles, or features only; as for the disposition of the limbs, and their attitude, he can no longer mend or alter them.
11. The figure thus well prepared, you are to place what is called the pouring and the vent holes. The pouring holes are wax-pipes of the bigness of an inch diameter forsuch figures as are of a natural size; for they are to be proportioned not only to the size of the figures, but even to that of the parts of that figure whereon they are placed. The vent-holes are wax-pipes likewise, bat of much lesser size. Those pipes are cast in plaister moulds of what length you please. then cut to that of four or five inches, or thereabouts. They are cast hollow, to the intent of rendering them lighter, otherwise they might as well be cast solid. Those which serve for pouring, are placed in a straight perpendicular line, one above another, at six inches asunder, and sometimes nearer, when there are draperies, and much matter is used.
12. When the various pipes are placed and soldered against the figure, with wax, so that the end which is free should be upwards, and as much perpendicular to the figure as possible, you place another pipe of the same size quite perpendicular, which is to be fixed against every one of the ends of the others. All these pipes, both large and small serve for the pouring of the matter, and calling of the figure. You are to place three or four of them generally round the figure, which is determined by its size, bulk, and disposition.
13. But at the same time you are placing the pouring-holes, you must not neglect placing also those which are to serve for the vent. These iast are to be placed in the same line as and with the others, at the distance of four inches only from them, and fixed likewise by one end to the figure, and by the other to another long and perpendicular pipe, like those for pouring. Now, as it is necessary that all the wax, when you come to melt it, should, as we shall mention in its place, come out entirely from the mould, you must not fail to place those sorts of vent-pipes on all the rising and distant parts from the mean bulk of the figure, such as the arms, fingers, draperies, &c. &c. from which the wax must be got out with facility, either by means of particular vent-holes, so formed as to descend to the bottom of the figure, or by means of those large ones placed perpendicularly along-side of it. - Observe, always, to make the pouring-holes which come to the face and hands the smallest of any, that they may not affect too much the features and likeness, if any be intended, of those parts; and that you may the more easily repair those places with the chisel, when they are finished.
14. After these various pipes have been thus carefully fixed all about the figure, you must so place them that two of the main perdendicular ones should join together at five or six inches higher, and above the upper part of it, and be terminated by a wax cup of four inches deep, and as much diameter, under, and at the bottom part of which you solder them. This cup serves as a funnel to receive the metal, and introduces it into the pouring-holes, by means of its communcation with them, to convey it afterwards into all the parts of the figure at once, and form it. Therefore, if there be four perpendicular ascending pipes, you make two such cups, to communicate the metal to these pipes.
15. As for the vent-holes, you let them free above the top of the figure, and higher than the pouring ones, because they want no cups.
16. When the wax figure is thus completely repaired and garnished, with all its pouring and vent-holes, you prepare a composition of putty, and crucibles' powder, well grinded, and sifted very fine, which you dilute clear in a pan, like a colour for painting. With a brush take this composition, and cover all the figure, as well as the vent and pouring-pipes. This operation you repeat several times, ofeserving carefully to fill up all the cracks and crevices which may happe,in drying. When the wax is thus perfectly covered every where, you put with the same brush, another composition thicker than the first, and of a stronger sort.
17. This composition is made of the same materials as the other, buc with this addition, that you mix some free earth along with it, and horse-dung, quite clear from any draw. After having given six or seven coats of this, you give another coat again, much thicker still, of a stuff composed of nothing but free earth and horse-dung, and this being dry, you give half-a-dozen more of the same, allowing time between each to dry. At last, you put with your hand, and no more with the brush, two other coats of this same last composition, of free earth and horse-dung, mixed in form of mortar, obfering always that the one mould be perfectly dry, before laying on the other; and that there should be no part of the figure, whether naked or draperies, but what is equally covered with every one of the different coats we have mentioned.
18. Next to this, you must have flat iron bars turned and bent according to the disposition of the figure, which being fixed, by means of hooks at the sides of the grate on which it stands, rise up as high as the pipes, and joining close to the mould, unite at top by means of a circle of iron which runs through all the hooks, by which these bars are terminated. Then you surround again the figure with other iron bars, made in form of hcops, to prevent the others which go from top to bottom, and to which they are fixed by means of wires, from giving way; and, between every one of these bars, both perpendicular and horizontal, there must be no more than seven or eight inches distance allowed.
19. When all these bars are well fixed together, and enabled thereby to support and contain the mould, you take a compost of free earth, horse-dung and hair mixed together, in considence of mortar, and with this you cover the mould and the bars all over, without attending any more to the shape of the figure, so that there appears no more but a shapeless lump of clay, which ought to be of about four or five inches thick.
20. When the mould is thus completed, you are to dig a square pit sufficiently deep for the top of the mould to be somewhat lower than the superfice of the ground where the pit is dug, and sufficiently wide also to allow room of a soot and a half, free all round the mould, when descended into it. - At the bottom of that pit, you construct a furnace, on the top of which there is to be a strong iron grate supported by the arches and wall of the furnace, which is to be made of stone or bricks, as well as the four sides of the pit from top to bottom.
21. After the grate is placed on the furnace, you descend the mould on it by means of engines. Then, under the pipes which are to serve for pouring, as well as vent, you place pans to receive the wax which is to run off. This done, you light a middling fire to heat the figure, and all the place wherest stands, with so moderate a heat, that the wax may melt without boiling, and come entirely out from the mould, without there remaining any part of it; which would not be the case if the heat be so great as to make it boil, for then it would stick to the mould, and cause defects in the figure, when you come to run the metal. - When, therefore, you judge that all the wax is out, which you may know by weighing that you employed, and weighing it again after it is in the pans, you take these off, and stop the pipes, through which it came out, with clay. Then fill all the empty parts of the pit round the figure with bricks, which you throw in gently, but without order; and, when it is come up to the top, make a good brisk fire in the furnace. As the flame is interrupted by these bricks, it cannot ascend with violence, nor hurt the mould, and they only communicate their heat in going through all those bricks, which become so hot, that they and the mould are at last both red hot.
22. Twenty-four hours after the fire has been lighted, when you see that the bricks and the moud are equally red hot from top, bottom, you let the fire go out, and the mould cool, by taking all the bricks off. When there is no more any heat at all you throw some earth in the pit, to fill the place which had been occupied with the bricks, and, in proportion as you throw it in you tread it with your feet, and press it against the mould.
23. In order to melt the metal, you construct just by the pit where the mould is, a furnace, the lower part of which ought to be higher by two or thrre inches than the top of the said pit, in order to obtain a sufficient declivity from it to the pit for the running of the metal. Its construction must be after the form of an oven, with good bricks and free earth, and supported by good and strong iron hoops. There is a border raised all round, so as to make it capable to contain all the metal which is intended to be melted in it. On the side which looks towards the pit, there is an opening, which is stopped during the melting of the metal, and from that opening comes an earthen funnel practised, which goes to a bason of good free earth placed over the mould, and the middle of which corresponds and communicates to those cups we have mentioned before (No. 14). This bason is called by the workmen escheno. And in order to prevent the metal from running into these cups before the whole which is in the furnace is run into the escheno there are men on purpose who hold a long iron rud terminated by one end in the form of these cups, and stop them.
24. When the metal is melted, you unstop the opening of the furnace in which it is contained; this runs into the escheno, and as soon as it is arrived, the men take off the rod with which they stopped the cups, and the mould being instantly filled all over, the figure is formed in one moment.
25. After the mould is thus filled with the metal, you let it stayin that situation for three or four days, then, at leisure, you take off the earth which had been thrown all round it, which helps the mould to become entirely cold. As soon as you are sure there is no more heat, you break the mould, and the metal figure appears surrounded with rods of the same metal, starting out from it, occasioned by the vent and pouring-holes, or pipes, through which the metal was introduced, and which remained filled with it. These you must saw off, in order to unburden the figure of so much, and get it out of the pit more easily. Then you clean and scower with water and grinding-stone in powder, and pieces of deal or other sort of soft wood, and you search in all the hollow places of the draperies and other parts.
26. When the figures are small, they are generally washed with aquafortis; and, when it has operated, you may wash them again with common water. VWhen they are thus well cleansed, you repair, finish, and fault those which require to be treated more highly than others; for the large ones are seldom searched so minutely.
27. After they have been as much finished as they are intended to be, you may give them, if you like, a colour, as some do, with oil and blood-stone. Or, as some others practise it, you may make them turn green by means of vinegar. But without all that trouble, the bronze will in time take a natural varnish of itself, and becomes of a blackish hue.
II. How to gild such sorts of figures.
1. They may be gilt two different ways; either with gold in shells, or with gold in leaves. The first method is the handsomest, and at the same time the molt lasting, ii being always used for small sized works. To apply it, you make a mixture of one part of the hest gold, and seven, of mercury, which founders call silver in that sort of process. When these are incorporated together, you then heat the figure, and rub it with the composition, which whitens it, and heating it again over the fire the mercury exhales, and the figure, remains gilt.
2. As for the other method it is only for large sized works, and them on which one is not willing to a great expence; you scrape the figure with small files, and other proper tools, to make it quick and then you heat and lay on a gold leaf, repeating this four times.
III. Of the choice and composition of metals.
Any metal whatever may be used for the calling of figures, though the general composition runs as follows.
1. For the fine bronze figures, the alloy is half brass, half copper. The Egyptians who are said to be the inventors of that art used to employ two thirds of brass against one of copper
2. Brass is made with copper and calamine. One hundred weight calamine renders one hundred per cent. Calamine is a stone from which a yellow dye is drawn. It is to be found in France and at Liege.
3. Good copper ought to be beaten, not molten, when intended for statues. You must guard also against using putty, when in alloy with lead.
4. Copper may be forged either hot or cold. But brass breaks when cold, and suffers the hammer only when hot.
5. There is a sort of metalic stone called Zinc, which comes from Egypt: it renders the copper of a much finer yellow than the calamine, but, as it is both dearer and scarcer, they are not so ready to use it.
6. As for the composition for making of bells, it is twenty pounds weight pewter for each hundred of copper. And the artillery pieces take but ten pounds only of pewter to one hundred of the other. This last composition is pot good for the calling of figures, as it is both too hard and too brittle.
or Approved Directions, from the best Artists, for the Various Methods...
Printed by Thomas Hubbard,
Norwich, 1795I. To cast a figure in bronze.
1. To cast a figure, or any other piece in bronze, you must, first, make a pattern with a proper clay. That clay ought to be mixed with sand, to prevent its cracking, when it comes to dry.
2. When the pattern is completed and the sculptor is pleased with his work, you mould it with plaister while it is still damp, because th drying, the parts of the pattern shrink, and lose their fullness. To that effect you begin by the bottom part of the figure, which you cover with several pieces, and by rows; as for example, let us suppose the first row from the feet to the knees; the second from the knees to the beginning of the belly; the third from the beginning of the belly up to the pit of the stomach, from thence to the shoulders, on which you lay the last row, which is to contain the head - Observe, how ever, that those divisions of rows admit of no particular rule, and ought to be intirely determined by, and adapted to, the size of the figure. For when the pieces are made too considerable, the plaister works too much, and fatigues itself, which is detrimental to its taking a true and precise impression of all the turns and shapes of the figure. So that at any rate, it is always preferable to make the pieces of the mould smaller than larger.
3. You must observe, that if the figure you are moulding have got any draperies, or other sorts of ornaments about it which require a good deal of trouble and nicety, you cannot help making a great many small parts and subdivisions in your mould, in order to enable you to strip them off the figure afterwards with more facility. In which circumstance, when all these small parts are made, and garnished with little rings to assist in pulling them off more easily, you cover them all over witg larger pieces, which containing several of the little ones, are called cases, and in French chapes.
4. When the mould is thus made and completed, you let it rest till it is perfectly dry. Then, before using it, they who are curious in their work, do not content themselves with imbibing it inwardly with oil, but they even make it drink as much wax as it can soak, by warming those separate pieces, and putting wax in them to melt. The motive, in doing this, is to render the wax-work, which is to be cast in it finer and more perfect. For if you imbibe the mould with oil only, the wax figure cast in such a mould always comes out a little rough and like flour, because the wax draws always the superficy of the plaister, and in reverse, the plaister draws also the superficy of the wax, which produces a great defect in the figure, and is a great obstacle to its coming out from the mould with that neatness it otherwise should.
5. The mould being therefore thus imbibed with wax, if you want it for a bronze figure, you assemble all the small parts of it each in their cases, and with a brush give them a coat of oil. Then, with another brush, give them another coat also of wax, prepared as follows. - Six pounds of wax, half-apound of hog's lard, and one pound of Burgundy pitch. - This preparation of the wax, however, must be regulated according to the country and the season. For in the heat of summer, or hot climes, such as Spain, Italy, and France, wax may be used alone, as it keeps naturally soft, and the other drugs above-mentioned, are added to it only to render it more traclable. Of this wax, therefore, whether prepared or natural, you lay another coat, as we said, in the hollow of the mould, to the thickness of a sixpenny piece. Then, with wax made in flat cakes, of the thickness of a quarter of an inch, more or less, according to that you are willing to give your metal, you fill all the hollow parts of the mould in pressing hard this sort of wax in them with your fingers. When thus fillet, you have an iron grate, larger by three or four inches every way than the plinth or basis of the figure. On the middle of that grate you erect one or more iron bars, contoured agreeable to the latitude and situation of the figure, and bored, from space to space, with holes to pass other iron rods of the size and length necessary to support the core (in French ame or noyau] of what you want to cast.
6. Formerly they used to make their cores with potter's clay mixed with hair and horse-durg well beaten together. With this compost, they formed a figure like the pattern; and, when they had well supported it with iron bars, length and crossways, according to its position and attitude, they scraped it, that is to say, they diminished, and took off from its bigness as much as they wanted to give to their metal. When that core was dry, they took the wax with which they had filled the hollow parts of their mould, and covered it with them. - This method is even practised row by some founders, especially for great bronze figures, because earth resists better the power of that red-hot melted metal, than plaister can; and this they reserve only for small figures, and those which are cast in gold or silver. However, when plaister is well beaten and mixed with brick dust also well beaten and sifted fine, it stands pretty well too. We shall therefore proceed on the method of casting on plaister cores.
7. You take then the first, or bottom rows, of the mould, filled by the last wax in cakes, as mentioned before, and assemble them on the iron grate round the principal iron bar, which is to support the core when made. When they are joined together, you give them a tye round very hard with cords, left they should vary from their position when you form the core.
8. To form this, as soon as the first set which completes the bottom row of the separate pieces of the mould is fixed, you pour phifter, diluted very clear, and mixed, as we said, with brick-dust, with which you fill up that bottom part of the hollow. Then, on this first bottom row of the mould, you place the second in the same manner as the first; then fill it likewise with your prepared plaister. Thus you continue to erect your mould from row to row, till you come to the last, and fill it as you go, with plaister, which is called forming the core. If the figure require it, you pass across the core some iron rods through the holes perforated forth at purpose in the perpendicular bars, in order to support the cort the better, and give it more strength and power to refill the effort of the metal when it comes in fusion upon it.
9. When all the pieces of the mould have been thus erected one upon another, and filled with plaister, yon limit stop a certain time to let it take a considence, then proceed to take off the cases and all the smaller parts of the mould contained in each of them, row by row, and one by one, in the same manner as you proceeded to erect them, with this difference, that in erecting them you begin at the bottom, and that in taking them off, you begun at the top; which, when done, leaves the figure to appear all in wax, covering the core, which is contained in the inside of it.
10. You are then to proceed to the repairing of the figure and finish it after the original. The sculptor, in that case, has even an opportunity of perfecting much some of the parts, in adding or taking off according as he thinks proper, to give more grace and expression to certain strokes, muscles, or features only; as for the disposition of the limbs, and their attitude, he can no longer mend or alter them.
11. The figure thus well prepared, you are to place what is called the pouring and the vent holes. The pouring holes are wax-pipes of the bigness of an inch diameter forsuch figures as are of a natural size; for they are to be proportioned not only to the size of the figures, but even to that of the parts of that figure whereon they are placed. The vent-holes are wax-pipes likewise, bat of much lesser size. Those pipes are cast in plaister moulds of what length you please. then cut to that of four or five inches, or thereabouts. They are cast hollow, to the intent of rendering them lighter, otherwise they might as well be cast solid. Those which serve for pouring, are placed in a straight perpendicular line, one above another, at six inches asunder, and sometimes nearer, when there are draperies, and much matter is used.
12. When the various pipes are placed and soldered against the figure, with wax, so that the end which is free should be upwards, and as much perpendicular to the figure as possible, you place another pipe of the same size quite perpendicular, which is to be fixed against every one of the ends of the others. All these pipes, both large and small serve for the pouring of the matter, and calling of the figure. You are to place three or four of them generally round the figure, which is determined by its size, bulk, and disposition.
13. But at the same time you are placing the pouring-holes, you must not neglect placing also those which are to serve for the vent. These iast are to be placed in the same line as and with the others, at the distance of four inches only from them, and fixed likewise by one end to the figure, and by the other to another long and perpendicular pipe, like those for pouring. Now, as it is necessary that all the wax, when you come to melt it, should, as we shall mention in its place, come out entirely from the mould, you must not fail to place those sorts of vent-pipes on all the rising and distant parts from the mean bulk of the figure, such as the arms, fingers, draperies, &c. &c. from which the wax must be got out with facility, either by means of particular vent-holes, so formed as to descend to the bottom of the figure, or by means of those large ones placed perpendicularly along-side of it. - Observe, always, to make the pouring-holes which come to the face and hands the smallest of any, that they may not affect too much the features and likeness, if any be intended, of those parts; and that you may the more easily repair those places with the chisel, when they are finished.
14. After these various pipes have been thus carefully fixed all about the figure, you must so place them that two of the main perdendicular ones should join together at five or six inches higher, and above the upper part of it, and be terminated by a wax cup of four inches deep, and as much diameter, under, and at the bottom part of which you solder them. This cup serves as a funnel to receive the metal, and introduces it into the pouring-holes, by means of its communcation with them, to convey it afterwards into all the parts of the figure at once, and form it. Therefore, if there be four perpendicular ascending pipes, you make two such cups, to communicate the metal to these pipes.
15. As for the vent-holes, you let them free above the top of the figure, and higher than the pouring ones, because they want no cups.
16. When the wax figure is thus completely repaired and garnished, with all its pouring and vent-holes, you prepare a composition of putty, and crucibles' powder, well grinded, and sifted very fine, which you dilute clear in a pan, like a colour for painting. With a brush take this composition, and cover all the figure, as well as the vent and pouring-pipes. This operation you repeat several times, ofeserving carefully to fill up all the cracks and crevices which may happe,in drying. When the wax is thus perfectly covered every where, you put with the same brush, another composition thicker than the first, and of a stronger sort.
17. This composition is made of the same materials as the other, buc with this addition, that you mix some free earth along with it, and horse-dung, quite clear from any draw. After having given six or seven coats of this, you give another coat again, much thicker still, of a stuff composed of nothing but free earth and horse-dung, and this being dry, you give half-a-dozen more of the same, allowing time between each to dry. At last, you put with your hand, and no more with the brush, two other coats of this same last composition, of free earth and horse-dung, mixed in form of mortar, obfering always that the one mould be perfectly dry, before laying on the other; and that there should be no part of the figure, whether naked or draperies, but what is equally covered with every one of the different coats we have mentioned.
18. Next to this, you must have flat iron bars turned and bent according to the disposition of the figure, which being fixed, by means of hooks at the sides of the grate on which it stands, rise up as high as the pipes, and joining close to the mould, unite at top by means of a circle of iron which runs through all the hooks, by which these bars are terminated. Then you surround again the figure with other iron bars, made in form of hcops, to prevent the others which go from top to bottom, and to which they are fixed by means of wires, from giving way; and, between every one of these bars, both perpendicular and horizontal, there must be no more than seven or eight inches distance allowed.
19. When all these bars are well fixed together, and enabled thereby to support and contain the mould, you take a compost of free earth, horse-dung and hair mixed together, in considence of mortar, and with this you cover the mould and the bars all over, without attending any more to the shape of the figure, so that there appears no more but a shapeless lump of clay, which ought to be of about four or five inches thick.
20. When the mould is thus completed, you are to dig a square pit sufficiently deep for the top of the mould to be somewhat lower than the superfice of the ground where the pit is dug, and sufficiently wide also to allow room of a soot and a half, free all round the mould, when descended into it. - At the bottom of that pit, you construct a furnace, on the top of which there is to be a strong iron grate supported by the arches and wall of the furnace, which is to be made of stone or bricks, as well as the four sides of the pit from top to bottom.
21. After the grate is placed on the furnace, you descend the mould on it by means of engines. Then, under the pipes which are to serve for pouring, as well as vent, you place pans to receive the wax which is to run off. This done, you light a middling fire to heat the figure, and all the place wherest stands, with so moderate a heat, that the wax may melt without boiling, and come entirely out from the mould, without there remaining any part of it; which would not be the case if the heat be so great as to make it boil, for then it would stick to the mould, and cause defects in the figure, when you come to run the metal. - When, therefore, you judge that all the wax is out, which you may know by weighing that you employed, and weighing it again after it is in the pans, you take these off, and stop the pipes, through which it came out, with clay. Then fill all the empty parts of the pit round the figure with bricks, which you throw in gently, but without order; and, when it is come up to the top, make a good brisk fire in the furnace. As the flame is interrupted by these bricks, it cannot ascend with violence, nor hurt the mould, and they only communicate their heat in going through all those bricks, which become so hot, that they and the mould are at last both red hot.
22. Twenty-four hours after the fire has been lighted, when you see that the bricks and the moud are equally red hot from top, bottom, you let the fire go out, and the mould cool, by taking all the bricks off. When there is no more any heat at all you throw some earth in the pit, to fill the place which had been occupied with the bricks, and, in proportion as you throw it in you tread it with your feet, and press it against the mould.
23. In order to melt the metal, you construct just by the pit where the mould is, a furnace, the lower part of which ought to be higher by two or thrre inches than the top of the said pit, in order to obtain a sufficient declivity from it to the pit for the running of the metal. Its construction must be after the form of an oven, with good bricks and free earth, and supported by good and strong iron hoops. There is a border raised all round, so as to make it capable to contain all the metal which is intended to be melted in it. On the side which looks towards the pit, there is an opening, which is stopped during the melting of the metal, and from that opening comes an earthen funnel practised, which goes to a bason of good free earth placed over the mould, and the middle of which corresponds and communicates to those cups we have mentioned before (No. 14). This bason is called by the workmen escheno. And in order to prevent the metal from running into these cups before the whole which is in the furnace is run into the escheno there are men on purpose who hold a long iron rud terminated by one end in the form of these cups, and stop them.
24. When the metal is melted, you unstop the opening of the furnace in which it is contained; this runs into the escheno, and as soon as it is arrived, the men take off the rod with which they stopped the cups, and the mould being instantly filled all over, the figure is formed in one moment.
25. After the mould is thus filled with the metal, you let it stayin that situation for three or four days, then, at leisure, you take off the earth which had been thrown all round it, which helps the mould to become entirely cold. As soon as you are sure there is no more heat, you break the mould, and the metal figure appears surrounded with rods of the same metal, starting out from it, occasioned by the vent and pouring-holes, or pipes, through which the metal was introduced, and which remained filled with it. These you must saw off, in order to unburden the figure of so much, and get it out of the pit more easily. Then you clean and scower with water and grinding-stone in powder, and pieces of deal or other sort of soft wood, and you search in all the hollow places of the draperies and other parts.
26. When the figures are small, they are generally washed with aquafortis; and, when it has operated, you may wash them again with common water. VWhen they are thus well cleansed, you repair, finish, and fault those which require to be treated more highly than others; for the large ones are seldom searched so minutely.
27. After they have been as much finished as they are intended to be, you may give them, if you like, a colour, as some do, with oil and blood-stone. Or, as some others practise it, you may make them turn green by means of vinegar. But without all that trouble, the bronze will in time take a natural varnish of itself, and becomes of a blackish hue.
II. How to gild such sorts of figures.
1. They may be gilt two different ways; either with gold in shells, or with gold in leaves. The first method is the handsomest, and at the same time the molt lasting, ii being always used for small sized works. To apply it, you make a mixture of one part of the hest gold, and seven, of mercury, which founders call silver in that sort of process. When these are incorporated together, you then heat the figure, and rub it with the composition, which whitens it, and heating it again over the fire the mercury exhales, and the figure, remains gilt.
2. As for the other method it is only for large sized works, and them on which one is not willing to a great expence; you scrape the figure with small files, and other proper tools, to make it quick and then you heat and lay on a gold leaf, repeating this four times.
III. Of the choice and composition of metals.
Any metal whatever may be used for the calling of figures, though the general composition runs as follows.
1. For the fine bronze figures, the alloy is half brass, half copper. The Egyptians who are said to be the inventors of that art used to employ two thirds of brass against one of copper
2. Brass is made with copper and calamine. One hundred weight calamine renders one hundred per cent. Calamine is a stone from which a yellow dye is drawn. It is to be found in France and at Liege.
3. Good copper ought to be beaten, not molten, when intended for statues. You must guard also against using putty, when in alloy with lead.
4. Copper may be forged either hot or cold. But brass breaks when cold, and suffers the hammer only when hot.
5. There is a sort of metalic stone called Zinc, which comes from Egypt: it renders the copper of a much finer yellow than the calamine, but, as it is both dearer and scarcer, they are not so ready to use it.
6. As for the composition for making of bells, it is twenty pounds weight pewter for each hundred of copper. And the artillery pieces take but ten pounds only of pewter to one hundred of the other. This last composition is pot good for the calling of figures, as it is both too hard and too brittle.