Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/108

98 The term is an entirely correlative one; what is rubbish to one person under certain circumstances being under altered conditions extremely valuable to another. Gold itself is rubbish in the eyes of a man who is starving on a desert island; and the pearls which adorn a royal diadem, and have made the fortune of the lucky finder, were probably felt to be worse than useless by the poor oyster, tormented by the presence of some particle of matter which he felt to be decidedly "out of place" within his shell. Many a cook, no doubt, has washed the little fresh-water bleak, a fish about four inches long, and had thoughtlessly poured away the water after the operation, before it occurred to the French bead-maker that the lustrous silvery sediment deposited at the bottom of the vessel might be turned to account in the manufacture of artificial pearls, or pearl-beads.

It is, indeed, strange to consider how many of our most highly prized adornments and our most useful and important manufactures are derived from our own and Nature's refuse. The jet which brings in some twenty thousand pounds a year to the town of Whitby alone is merely a compact, highly lustrous, and deep-black variety of lignite a species of coal less ancient in origin than that of the Carboniferous era which we usually burn. And coal itself, as we know, is merely the refuse of ancient forests and jungles, peat-mosses and cypress swamps, which has been mineralized in the course of ages and stored for our use in the bowels of the earth. Amber, too, which is also used for ornaments, especially in the East, is but the fossil gum or resin of the Pinites succinifer, large forests of which seem to have existed in the northeast portion of what is now the bed of the Baltic. To the pine-tree this gum was certainly nothing but refuse, a something to be got rid of; but Nature, who rejects nothing however vile and contemptible, received it into her lumber-room, her universal storehouse, and, after keeping it patiently much more than the traditional seven years, sends it out again, transformed and yet the same, to adorn the Eastern beauty, and to give employment to many a skillful pair of hands. Bogwood, which, like jet, is used for bracelets, brooches, etc., is merely oak or other hard wood which has lain for years in. peat-bogs or marshes, and has acquired its dark coloring from the action of oxidized metal upon the tannin it contained.

Turning, however, from Nature's processes to those of man, we find that he is doing his best, however clumsily, to follow the thrifty example she sets him. For many and many a year no doubt the pine tree shed its pointed, needle-like leaves in the Silesian forests, and there they were left to decay and turn into mold at their leisure, until M. Pannewitz started a manufactory for converting them into forest-wool, which, besides being efficacious in cases of rheumatism when applied in its woolly state, can also be curled, felted, or woven. Mixed with cotton, it has even been used for blankets and wearing apparel. The ethereal oil evolved during the preparation of the wool