efforts of a single man to make in large quantities a good article, which he was already making in small quantities. If he had resorted to trickery and deception he might have achieved a temporary success, but he could never have laid the foundations of such a great industry with any other corner-stone than that of honesty. A very full and readable description of the processes of making butter and cheese is published in the November number of Harper's Monthly Magazine. Of these we can only say that they have been the subject of study by chemists and practical dairymen of the highest culture, and that, although the latter know how to make good cheese, neither they nor the chemists understand precisely how it is done. One hundred parts of milk are made up of about eighty-seven and one-half parts of water, three and one-half parts of butter, three and one-eighth parts of caseine or pure curd, five and one-eighth parts of sugar, and less than one part of mineral matter. In cheese-making the design is to harden the caseine or curd, and to do it in such a way as to imprison globules of butter-oil in the curd. To coagulate the milk the cheese-maker pours a solution of rennet into the milk, and then begins the operation he does not understand — the "digestion" of the milk. The curing of the cheese is regarded as a further process of digestion. Cheese-factories, as they are now built, are great buildings supplied with steam-power and steam-heating apparatus, and are altogether unlike the dairies of a quarter of a century ago. The cheese-maker is an educated workman; his associates, the dairymen, are scarcely inferior in knowledge, and it is said that the treasurer of a "factory association," himself a dairyman, must attain such mathematical accuracy as to be able to demonstrate that it took 9.746 pounds of milk to make a pound of cheese, and that he who delivered a pound of milk to the factory is entitled therefore to 1.274 cents, at the then ruling price of cheese.
A NEW PAPER-MAKING MATERIAL.
It is perhaps not generally known that but for the large importation of esparto, a species of tough grass, from Spain, to be used in paper-making, great difficulty would long since have existed in producing the enormous quantity of paper now required by the ever-increasing demands of the press. Though inferior to rags in the manufacture of the article, esparto is excellent as an auxiliary, and the possibility of procuring it has been a consolation to paper-makers. Alas! there now comes a pinch. The demand for esparto has been the death of it. We have all heard of that infatuated proceeding, familiarly known as "killing the goose that laid the golden eggs." The Spaniards who had the supply of esparto have killed their "goose." Instead of cutting their esparto with scythes, so as to leave it to grow a fresh crop, they have habitually pulled it up by the roots, and according to last accounts, whole districts of country were desolate. The esparto was gone. So much for reckless mismanagement. A great source of traffic is dried up, or very nearly so.
We need not waste words on the folly committed by Spantsh esparto growers and collectors. They are deaf to remonstrance, and past pity or hope of improvement. Leaving them to their wretched poverty and ruin, the question we have to consider is how we are to find a due supply of materials for the paper-manufacturer. The mountain plateaux of Africa, as we understand, would yield a good supply of esparto, but it is of inferior quality, and much cost and trouble would be incurred in bringing it to any sea-port. Accordingly, it has to be given up, and we must think of something else. In contemplation of the exigency, Mr. Thomas Routledge, of Sunderland, has been seriously considering the subject of cheap substitutes for esparto, and has alighted on what he thinks will answer the purpose. The article is bamboo. In a pamphlet entitled "Bamboo, considered as a Paper-making Material" (London and New York: E. and F. N. Spon), he has just made known the result of his investigations and experiments. Fortunately for the paper-trade, he says, and its supply of materials in the future, two raw fibrous substances exist, to one of which his pamphlet is chiefly devoted.
From time immemorial, several varieties of fine paper have been made from bamboo in China and Japan, and this induced Mr. Routledge to enter upon some experiments to see if it could not be advantageously utilized, although it had previously been tried with results which, commercially speaking, were not a success. Mr. Routledge believes that, with his new system of treatment, bamboo will prove to be as superior to esparto in every respect, as
