Morning journal and courier., 1880-04-02
Important Practical Information.

Dr. R. 0. Kedzie, of Michigan, is Professor | of Chemistry in the State Agricultural Uni | versity at Lansing, and is President of the l State Board of Health of that State. He is | distinguished in all his public efforts for his
 eminently practical good sense, which makes all his services of the highest value to the peo- pie of the State.
 At Sanitary Convention" held last week in Grand Rapids, Prof. Kedzie read paper
 on Some Conditions of Infammability, il- l lustrated by practical experiments. The 1 whole paper would be interesting to our read CTS; but we wish to give briefly only two or ! three receipts contained in it, which must be l practically useful everywhere. The first is to prepare cotton wearing apparel so that it will | not burn with blaze, and thus remove the
 danger to life from clothes taking fire. This | has been done for years in Queen Victoria 8 | laundry, by adding tungstate of soda and phos- phate of soda to the starch, but these are not sufficiently common to be of practicable use in l every community. Tho same result Dr. Ksd- | zie says, may be obtained by putting @ tea spoonful of powdered borax into pint of | gslatinizsd common starch. (Gelatinized l starch is the starch after water has been added | to it.
 This is positively harmless in it's effects. up on cloth or upon the wearer, is very cheap,
 and so common and simple that any one and l every one may safely use it. At the meeting, ! Dr. Kedzie showed by experiments that mus | l when treated with it could not be made to | burn with blaze. If all cotton dresses and | underclothing, and especially the clothing of | children, could be treated in this way with bo- | rax, great number of lives and much suffer | ing would be saved every year.
 Dr. Kedzie said he expected that one of l these days some shrewd fellow would use this receipt, and mix starch and borax, and sell it as Asbestos Starch" or with some other
 catching name, at 800 or 600 per cent. profit, | and get rich out of it; when the people could | just as well do their own mixing and save the profit.
 Another practical receipt, given by Dr. Ked- | zie, was to render wood uninhammable. He | said that paint or wash made of skim milk, ! thoroughly skinned, and water brine would produce this result, and he proved it by ex- | pertinent. He said this paint, or whitew ash,
 was durable, very cheap, impervious to water, Of agreeable color, and as 1t would prevent l wood from taking fire, he urged it's use, par ticularly on roofs, outbuildings, barns, 6Gc. In another connection, Dr. Kedzie stated fact in regard to sugar which may be practi- cally useful in cooking. He said that cane sugar is two and half times as sweet as grape sugar, which is closely allied to it, and differs so little from it that many persons
 cannot distinguish it. By cooking, the cane
 sugar may be changed to grape sugar and thus lose it's sweetenipg power. Some women will put the sugar in with mass of acid fruit
 to be cooked, and keep cooking, and keep adding sugar while it keeps growing sourer, ! until at last they will use two and half times as much sugar as they ought to secure the de- sired result. The cane sugar has been chang cd to grape sugar. Now, if the sugar had been added after the fruit was cooked, much less would have been required, and the result would have been required, and the result would
 have been far more satisfactory.
 We may judge that Dr. Kedzies paper was
 greatly enjoyed, and was highly instructive to all who heard it.