Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/669

Rh made of cork; and in water-proof garments this material is preferable to India-rubber, in that it allows a freer passage to the air.

Among other miscellaneous applications, may be named those for prosthesis in surgery, naturalists' blocks, rolling-pins for pastry, bath-landings, and wine-labels. The facility with which it is cut, makes cork available for fanciful works of art, as in landscape combinations,



models of monuments, cases for inclosing bottles to be mailed, spools for silk, the inkstands of our fathers' childhood; pen-holders, which being large and light, do not cramp the fingers, and hundreds of other articles of the kind. There is hardly a profession that does not make more or less use of cork. Gold-burnishers make their rubbers from it, and crystal-polishers their wheel-surfaces. It forms a very light and convenient mounting for watch-makers' lenses, which is used with a minimum amount of fatigue to the muscles of the eye. Applied as a tire to pulley-wheels, it secures a firmer adhesion of the bands. The stoppers of sucking-bottles have been replaced by cork tips which, being very cheap, can be renewed when the presence of a ferment in them is suspected. Cork is also used in a great many children's toys and plays; in fixing wigs on the heads of dolls; in toy guns and pistols; in shuttlecocks and skittles to be played in rooms. In fact, one is almost tempted to inquire to what use it can not be put.