Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/812

792 For May, 1887, the quotations had advanced to 11s. and 11s. 5d. This case is especially worthy of notice, because it constitutes another example of a great and rapid decline in the price of a standard and valuable commodity in the world's commerce, and for which—all the facts being clearly understood—it is not possible to assign any other cause than that of production in excess of any current demand for consumption, and which in turn has been solely contingent on the employment, under novel conditions, of improved methods for overcoming territorial and climatic difficulties.

Concurrently with the fall in the price of nitrate of soda, saltpeter, or nitrate of potash, also notably declined from 28s. 3d. in 1880 to 21s. in 1887 (for English refined), a fact which seems to find a sufficient explanation in the circumstance that nitrate of soda can be used to a certain extent as a substitute for nitrate of potash, and that the export of the latter from India, the country of chief supply, increased from 352,995 cwt. in 1881 to 451,917 cwt. in 1885, or 36 per cent.

—A quarter of a century ago, or less, paper was made almost exclusively from the fibers of cotton and linen rags; and with an enormous and continually increasing demand, paper and rags not only rapidly increased in price, but continually tended to increase, and thus greatly stimulated effort for the discovery and utilization of new fibrous materials for the manufacture of paper. These efforts have been so eminently successful that immense quantities of pulp suitable for the manufacture of paper are now made from the fibers of wood, straw, and various grasses, and so cheaply that the prices of fair qualities of book-paper have declined since the year 1872 to the extent of fully 50 per cent, while in the case of ordinary "news" the decline has been even greater. Rags, although still extensively used, have, by the competitive supply of substitute materials, and a consequent comparative lack of demand, been also greatly cheapened.

—But in no one article has the decline in recent years been more extraordinary and thoroughly capable of explanation than in the case of sulphate of quinine, a standard chemical preparation used extensively all over the world for medicinal purposes. In 1865 the highest price of sulphate of quinine in the English market was 4s. 4d. ($1.07) per ounce, which gradually advanced to 9s. 6d. in 1873, reacting to 6s. 9d. in 1876. In the subsequent year, owing to an interruption in the exportation of cinchona-bark from South America by civil war in New Granada, and by low water in the Magdalena River, the price advanced to the unprecedently high figure of 16s. 6d. ($4.70) per ounce, receding to 13s. in 1879, and 12s. in 1880. In 1883 identically the same article sold in Europe for 3s. 6d. per ounce, and in 1885 for 2s. 6d., a result entirely attributable to the successful and extensive introduction and growth of the cinchona-tree in the British and Dutch East Indies, and to the further very curious circumstance that, while the cinchona-barks from South America—the product of