SAWDUST.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 5698, 17 October 1896, Page 1

SAWDUST.

(Chambers' s Journal.) No waste product* however humble, that | can by any possibility be turned to profiti able account, nowa days escapes the searching eye of the practical economist ; and | amongst them sawdust appears to have received of late years its fair share of attention. A few of its everyday uses may be mentioned in passing. It is the best j possible packing for ice and oranges ; for strewing the floors of butchers' shops and | bar parlours -it takes the palm for cleanliness ; builders employ it largely to preventthe passage of sound between rooms ; to i the cricketer in showery weather it is a priceless boon; to it the rag doll owes its plumpness ; while special varieties have their special uses, that of boxwood for cleaning jewellery, that of mahogany for smoking fish, and those of birch and rosewood for cleaning furs. Under certain treatments its application enlarges. If, instead of the common practice of sprinkling a floor with water prior to sweeping it, wet sawdust be employed, as are tea-leaves on a carpet, the work is far more thoroughly performed, and no dust is raised; while the addition of some disinfectant to the wet sawdust makes the cleaning still more effectual. When carbonised, it makes an excellent filter, used in distilleries iv preference to ordinary charcoal ones, and in France to remove the unpleasant flavour common to some of their wines. In Germany, too, after a further chemical treatment, it is employed as a filtering and discolouring material. Oxalic acid, so largely employed in calicoprinting, in cleaning leather and brass, as a solvent for Prussian blue in the preparation j of blue ink, &c, and for taking iron mould j out .of linen, is manufactured on a large scale by oxidising sawdust with a mixture of the hydrates of potash and soda. In 1893 Mr John Wallace, a great fish- j shipper of Washington, found chilled sawdust to be not only superior to ice.as a packing for fish, but that its employment effected a great saving in every way. j As a manure it is by no means to be despised. It forwards the growth of young trees more than any other kind, and, in moderate quantity, will turn a common bad earth into good garden mould. The ground upon which wood-stacks have stood is always enriched to a surprising degree by the small pieces falling and' rotting, and the improvement of barren lands by planting Scotch firs has been advocated, on account of the falling spines, their mouldering and subsequent enriching of the soS. By the addition of other ingredients its sphere of usefulness still further expands. Saturated with a weak solution of carbolic acid, allowed to dry, and then enclosed in a bag of several layers of fine soft muslin, it forms an excellent antiseptic pad for. absorbing the discharge from wounds. Mixed with tan in the proportion of one to three, it makes a much better floor fora riding school than does the pure bark, and is so employed iv all oiu % cavalry barracks. With the refuse tar from the gas uianui factory added, and compressed into " cakes, a fuel is produced in every way superior to soft coal for open fires. For building purposes it is now extensively employed, more especially in Germany, as a basis for concrete in place of stone. After being mixed with certain refuse mineral products, it is compressed into the fomi of bricks, a series of experiments on which by the Technical Royal School at Charlottenburg proved them to •be very light, impetvious to wet, and ! entirely fireproof ; one that was placed for five hours in a coal fire came, out intact. The necessity for disposing of the vast accumulations in the numerous sawmills, both in Europe and America, led to an invention for compressing it into roofing boards. The substance known as xyolith or woodstone is nothing more than sawdust mixed with magnesia cement, saturated with chloride of calcium, and subjected to a pressure of one thousand pounds to the square inch; it is very hard and uninflammable, but can be sawn, planed, and dealt with generally like wood. In mortar it is superior even to hair for the prevention of crackling and subsequent peeling off of rough casting under the action of weather and frost. Its manufacture into bread-stuff in the northern countries of Europe has often been described by travellers, and now in Berlin wood biscuits are made as food for horses. Professor Brand succeeded in extracting gum and sugar (grape variety) by the action of sulphuric acid. Several firms turn out a rough kind of paper from it, while at St Etienne, in France, it is converted into silk which, it is said, can be sold for less than half the price of the genuine article. When it was reported, towards the close of 1892, that a German chemist had succeeded in making a first-rate brandy out of I saw-d\ist, the incident was noticed in a publication under the heading, "' A New Danger to Teetotalism/'and commented on in the following amusing strain : "We are a friend of the temperance movement, and want it to succeed ; but what chance will it have when a man can take a rip-saw and go out and get drunk on a fence-rail ? What is the use of a prohibitory liquor law if a man is able to make brandy-mashes out of the shingles on his roof, or if he can get delirium tremens by drinking the legs of his kitchen chairs ? You may shut up an inebriate out of a gin-shop and keep him away from taverns, but if he can become uproarious on boiled sawdust and desiccated window-sftls, any effort must necessarily be a failure." Its latestapplication is'reported in a recent issue of the Engineering and Miming Journal, which informs us that the little town of Deseronto, in Canada, where there are several large lumber-mills, is partially lighted by gas made from sawdust, and that the gas produced givesan illumination of about eighteen candle-power.

The Saxon village of Eisleben, famous as-the birthplace of Luther, is falßng-into^ decay^as'the resultotcontmue<J l earthqflra<kei. shocks, whioh began:in.lß92.