The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1854-04-25 00:00:00

CHEAP MATERIAL FOR PAPER.

Trn necessity of providing a cheaper and more
abundant supply of materials for the manufacture
of caper, than is at present furnished, is a subject
which is interesting to the paper-maker, the mer-
chant, the agriculturist, the scientific man, and
also every consumer of paper. We copy the follow-
ing from The Gardeners' Chronicle :
The wants of paper-makers can only be satisfied by
the production of more raw material. That material can
be as well provided in our own fields as by foreign impor-
tation, and we believe as abundantly. Whether, how-
ever, we can grow paper materials as cheaply as they may
be imported is a question to be answered by no other
means than by experiment. Country gentlemen, living
near paper mills, are those by whom the experiment
should be tried. It cannot cost much ; their gardeners
are the men to conduct it ; and now is the time to set
about it.
The problem to solve is, whether it is more profitable
to grow an acre of corn, of root crop, or of paper materials P

Paper materials are vegetable fibre. All plants con-
sist largely of this substance, but in some it is more
abundant than in others, or more separable, or finer, or
of a better colour. Those plants will be best suited for
the purpose in question in which it is most abundant,
most separable, finest, and whitest.

We are surrounded by suitable plants, but they are not
cultivated. Nettles and Mallows in particular are well
known to possess the requisite qualities ; so 'does the
Spanish Broom, and probably the Common Broom any
of these thrive in poor soil, where better crops cannot be
produced.

The common Stinging settle is an example of what we
mean. Its roots can be procured everywhere.; and as it
is perennial it will not only keep itself sufficiently clean,
but may be cut two or three times a year. The principal
cost consists in collecting its roots for planting, rent, &c.,
of land, and the labour of cutting and preparing. Its
fibre is very fine and good ; scarcely inferior to hemp, and
has been used in Germany in the manufacture of first
class paper. Fishing lines and cordage 'of good quality
are also said to -have been prepared from it. Wherever
anything can grow, there the nettle is •at home; no bad
seasons hurt it ; no neglect injures it:; and it is subject
to neither blight nor mildew, nor the 'ravages of insects.
A larger produce may, no donbt, be had from the
Hemp-leaved Nettle (Urtica canfttabina). This plant
does •not sting; its stems grow 5-6 feet high, and it is
perennial, 'like the last. But it 'can only be obtained
sparingly in botanic gardens, and-therefore is not imme-
diately available.

Mallows are to be had everywhere ; and from theta a
white fibre is procurable in abundance. We do not-find
that it has been employed in vaper-making, but its -fibre
is known tl o have been used for cordage. The best spe-
eies, we imagine, for a trial would be one of the annual
Mallows--; either the curlediieaved (Morava crisps) or the
Zebra Mallow (M. maorMana), seed of both which is
easily procurable of the great seed merchants. These are
well'hnown to gardenersAtecause of their being cultivated
as ornamental plants ; they. grow 6-8 feet high, and
come quickly to hand they might be drilled 'in rows
eighteen inches apart, and six inches asunder in'the rows.
-As to the common 'Broom, it is worth ascertaining
whether it may not be cut profitably for its 'fibre. Its
near relative, the Spanish Broom (Spartiorn.lunceum), is
reported to yield a very good substance without much
trouble. So much of the former is to be found among
plantations in poor candy districts, that there can be no
difficulty in procuring enough for a fair trial. It will
only be necessary to cut it close in now, so as to force the
bushes to produce ,plenty of young wood, *Thich should,
we imagine, be collected for the fibre, as soon as the wood
-shows the first signs of beginning to ripen.
It is by no means improbable, indeed, that many other
neglected plants ,may be turned to similar account, by
enlightened experimentalists ; for there is no doubt that
we are surrounded by wealth which we cannot recognise,
and which never will he appreciated till "-common things"
are understoothas well as useless rarities. In fact, there
is now before ns a sample of fibrous mafter, produced in
great abundance near Belmullet in Ireland, for which we
have to thank Mr. Billington. He does-atot say what the
plant is from which it was obtained, but he states that it
will grow very luxuriantly in cold bleak situations where
other crops refuse to thrive, and it seems to us to be very
much more easily convertible into paper than white wood
of any kind.
If, as we imagine, the object of the cultivator is to
obtain thegreatest amount of money-out of land at the
smallest possible expense, we venture-to submit the abere
considerations to our country friends. For ourselves, we
would as soon grow an acre of Thistles as an acre of Pota-
toes, if we could obtain as much profit; and this, althougla,
like all other speculations, it belongs at present to what
Mr. Justine Maule happily calls the "regions of indis-
tinctness," seems to us a subject extremely well worth
'careful investigation.

A correspondent of the Biistoi Mirror, in
detailing "a peep into a straw :paper mill;" 'near
Tovil,•in Kent, gives the following partieulars::—

All our readers are doubtless aware that straw is a
hollow' tube, and the ladies know that in bonnets at least
it has a' beautiful glaze on the outside, but they are not
perhaps aware that that glaze is in ireality an extremely
minute' film of glass, so that a straw is a bundle of small
fibres glued together, and lining theinside of a glass tube,
of which it is the object of the paper-maker to deprive it.
To effectthis, and leave the fibres ofd as free as possible,
the straw previously cleaned and cut in short lengths is
l'boiled •in a strong solution of soda iley, which dissolves
both the.glass and the glutinous substance. We-look for
a moment into a vast cauldron, whence issues a smell of
stale hay, and a cloud of hot steam, and cannot -say that
we have-seen the process of boiling, hut, declining to put
onr head further in, follow our conductor to whereanother
large boiling vat is being emptied into a little waggon, to
be carried to the bleaching pits, close 'by. It looks not
unlike the spent tan from the tanpits, and is almost as
dark, and we are puzzled how that •dirty+looking•heap is
ever to•be made into strong sheets of white paper, when
we are -referred to a large tank at the 'end of theToom,
where some hundredweights of chloride of -lime are dis-
solved, in some thousands of gallons ofwater, and account
at once 'for the smell pervading the whole mill. The
brown mess in the little waggon being now wheeled on
two rails, over one of the bleaching pits, is emptied-into
it, and a gutta percha syphon tube 'being put into the
bleach :liquor' the pit is filled up with 'it, and !left for
twenty-four hours, by which time the .chlorine and the
colour of 'the straw will have fought so fiercely as-to be
worse than-the celebrated Kilkenny cats, for not a vestige
of either remains. We don't wait for that, however, 'but
go down to the mill, properly so called, i. e., the place
where the bleached and boiled straw is ground into a ptilp.
Here is an oval trough, a sanguinary -machine, full of
knives, is •revolving rapidly, while the straw pas Sing
•through it, and round the trough, and through it again
and again, is rapidly reduced to a substance somewhat
resembling curdled milk, and having an addition of smalt
or ultramarine, looks very like the sky-blue of our sehoal
days left till next morning. Here also the Size, a com-
pound of soda and rosin, is added to it (without Which it
would be blotting•paper)., Let us leave it to its insatiable
tormentor to go 'ha& to the room we first entered ; 'but
here we fancy we must fail to give much idea of the
machine—suffice it to say, the pulp from the mill, still
looking like 'curdled Sky-blue, being kept in a 'constant
state of agitation, 'by agitators who, strange to say, do
not do mischief to the hands they work among, is run
into a small trough, with a slit at the bottom, through
which the pulp flows on to a kind of round towel,
made of wire gauze, where it parts with some of its
water, and which, travelling over its rollers, steadily
carries it of a uniform thickness over a square trough, con-
nected with a pump, which suck most of its water through
the wire gauze, and with the:help of some hundredweights
of air above presses it into something like solidity. Now
it wants all the sharpness .of our eyes to follow its move-
ments, as it first goes under rollers, looking like large
rolls of flannel, then along travelling blankets, up to the
ceiling and down to the floor, and in and out, and round
and round, under one hot roller of copper, and over another,
and at last emerges from the end•a web of paper, some five
feet wide, and capable of going on from here to Edinburgh
if required. It don't go to Edinburgh, though at least not
in its present state, but passing into the cutting machine
is divided into three strips therein, sad then cut off at
stated lengths, by a sort of horizontal guillotine, falling
into the hands of three boys in the universal paper caps,
to 'be carried away presently into the pressing and sorting
rooms, where a number of women, after examining the
sheets and rejecting the faulty ones, pack them in quires
and reams for the market.

It forms a paper somewhat harder and slightly more
brittle than the best rag papers, but admirably adapted for
printing can, as from those very qualities the type indents
it less than the more flexible and tougher rag paper, than
which it is moreover cheaper.

INDIAN SUBSTITUTES FOR RUSSIAN HEMP.—At the
last meeting of the Society of Arts, Dr. Forbes Royie read
a paper on " Indian fibres fit for textile fabrics, or for rope
and paper making." He stated that in the white-fibred
plants, such as the bowstring hemp, the aloe, the pita-fibre,
the pine apple, and, above all, the plaintain, we had bound-
less resources of material not only for paper making, but
for cordage, which would rival Manila hemp, or the Ameri-
can aloe which bridged over broad rivers. The oakum of
these plants might be converted into paper, and the fibres
into fabrics of different qualities ; and, though they might
not be fitted for making knots, they would yet make ropes
which were capable of bearing considerable strains. Among
the malvaceous and leguminous plants, or those among
which the brown hemp and "sum' " of India were found,
with the jute among the linden tribe, we had a variety of
cheap products, because the plants could be grown with
ease and their fibres separated with facility. If we re-
quired fibres possessed of all the strength of Russian or of
Polish hemp, we should find this property not only in the
hemp of the Himalays, but in the various nettles which
clothed the foot of these mountains, from Assam to the
Sutlej. One of the latter—the rheea fibre—he felt assured
would not only undersell every other fibre, but in point of
strength would take a position secondtonone of allthe fibres
at present imported. Some of this fibre had been made into
a 5-inch rope and bad been tried at Messrs. Huddart's
rope manufactory, where it was found that each square
inch made from the wild rheea bore in the first experiment
8441 b.; in the second experiment 8941 b, and that from the
rheea fibre, 9101 b ; while the average strength of rope made
with the best hemp, and after numerous experiments, from
the year 1803 to 1808, was 8051 b per square inch. In
December last some experiments were made at the East
India Company's military stores, with fibres in equal
weights and of equal lengths. The weight that each fibre
broke with was ascertained to be as follows :—St. Peters-
burg hemp, 1601 b ; Jubbulpore hemp, 1901 b ; Wuckoonar
fibre, 1751 b ; mudar, or yercum fibre (common all over
India), 1901 b ; China grass, 2501 b ; rheea fibre, 3901 b ;
wild rheea, from Assam, 3431 b; and Kote Kangra hemp
no breakage at 4001 b. This hemp was the cannabis satira
of botanists, and was cultivated in every part of India on
account of the intoxicating property of its leaves. Dr
Royle stated, in conclusion, that the Court of Directors
had ordered 20 tons of the rheea fibres, as well as of the
Himalayan hemps, to be sent here yearly for the purpose
of having them tried. A vast number of specimens of the
different fibres, and of the articles manufactured from
them, have been left At tlw Society of Arts for a few days
for inspection.

BIRTHS, MARRIAGES, aid DEATHS

THE CHARITIEB.—(WeekIy Repo,*)

INDUSTRIAL RAGGED SCHOOLS, SOHO-BTTr•EE;
APRIL It —On the books, boys 87, girls 62 ; average
attendance, boys 77, girls 63 ; sick list, boys 1, girls .2.;
obtained situations, boys 2, girls O.
ST. ANNE'S DISPENSARY AND EYE AND EAR
INSTITUTION, 9, ROSE-HILL, AAuti, 16.—New patients,
viz..:—Relieved at the institution, us ; relieved at their
own dwellings, 49; cases of prevailing epidemic, 0;
itotal, 3.98.

SOUTHERN AND TOXTETH IgOSPITAL, APRIL
19.—1 n-patients, discharged : cured, 11; relieved, and at
,own request, 3 ; irregular, 0 ; dead, 1 • entered, 18;
fonder treatment, 15. Out-patients : cured, 50; entered,
Z 3.; under treatment, 48.
ROYAL INFIRMARY, APRIL .22.—ADMITTED :
Is-patients, 39.; out-patients, 13 ; casuals, 10.—Ths-
cnrAD4 En : In-patients cured, 26 ' • relic:wed, &c., 9 ;
made out-patients, 10; irregular, 1; dead, o.—Remain in
the house, 164.

, NORTHERN HOSPITAL, APRIL 22.—ADMITTED:
Accidents, 52 ; medical and surgical cases, 15; total, 65.
DISCILVLGEL. : Cured, 17; relieved at own request, 9;
attending as out-patients., 42; irregular, 1; offed, 2 ;
remaining in the hospital, 109.
LIVERPOOL DISPENSARIES, 'lieges 21.—New
cases received advice and medicine at the institution—
North, 316; South, 275; total, 591. New cases visited
at their own houses and supplied with medicine—North,
143 ; South, 77 ; total, 320..