Modern Magic as Applied to Coal.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 880, 11 January 1889, Page 4

Modern Magic as Applied to Coal.

Pit-coal ha 3 been known for some hundreds of years. The discovery of its numberless products is confined to the present century. Illuminating gas was unknown 100 years ago. Petroleum has been in use only about forty years, and it is scarcely more than fifty since some one discovered that stone-coal was inflammable. Nearly all the other products derived from soft coal have been discovered and applied in the interests of science or of fraud within the last twenty-five years. The first thought in regard to coal is that it is made to give heat or warmth; the next that one of its principal uses is to illuminate. But there are obtained from it the means of producing over four hundred shades of colours, among the chief of which are saffron, violetblue and indigo. There are also obtained a great variety of perfumes—cinnamon, bitter almonds, queen of the meadows, clove, wintergreen, anise, camphor, thymol (a new French odour), vanaline and heliotropine. Some of these are üßed for flavoring. Among the explosive agents whose discovery has been caused by the war spirit of the last few years in Europe are two, called dinitrobenzine or tellite and picr&tes. To medicine coal has given hypnone, salicylic acid, naphtol, phenol and antipyrine. Benzine aud naphtaline are powerful insecticides. There have been found in it ammoniaeal salts useful as tannin, sacoharin (a substitute for sugar), the flavor of currants, raspberry and pepper, pyrogallic acid and hydroquinone, used iu photography, and various substances familiar or unfamiliar, suoh as tar, resin, ashphaltum, lubricating oil, varnish and the bitter taste of beer. By means of some of these we can have wine without the juice of the grape, beer without malt, preserves without either fruit or sugar, perfumes without flowers aud colouring matter without the vegetable or animal substances from which they have been hitherto chiefly derived.