Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 9.djvu/47

Rh It sometimes happens to the chemist in Oregon that he is consulted with regard to a pitchy substance in which the finder has an interest, it may be, because of the hope that it is an indication of oil in the ground from which it was taken. The material almost invariably turns out to be a mass of pitch resulting from the slow destructive distillation process which may accompany the burning of an old fir stump or root. Such masses may be preserved in the ground for years, and have more than once been confounded with Nehalem wax. Such a specimen was taken in 1906 to Professor C. E. Bradley, then professor of chemistry at Pacific University, Forest Grove, Oregon, after having been widely proclaimed in the newspapers as Nehalem wax. Professor Bradley analyzed this material in parallel with true samples from Nehalem, showed the difference between the two, and incidentally proved the identity of the latter as beeswax.

Finally, there are the results of a very thorough analytical investigation of the Nehalem product as carried out in the laboratories of the University of Oregon under the direction of the writer by Mr. W. T. Carroll, who made this work the subject of his graduation thesis in 1903. The results are tabulated in parallel with the well established numerical values accepted for other commercial waxes in the case of each character determined so that comparisons can easily be made. It should be noted that the values given for beeswax are from a study of many samples of German, English, and American waxes, all of which are in essential agreement.