EXPERIMENTS WITH FLAX.
A chemist of the Department of Agriculture had once occasion to make experiments with flax fibers, his object being to make them chemically pure; and to this end he treated them with excess of bleaching agents, thus rendering them of a beautiful white, silky appearance, to the naked eye; but when I examined them under the microscope, I found the brown nitrogenous matter of the joints still present, and on using the chromic acid test, they became deeply stained. A chemical solution of flax therefore would prove for some purposes undesirable, owing to the presence of this ligneous matter. A chemical solution of cotton which is destitute of ligneous matter will give a chemically pure solution. Cotton is therefore better adapted than flax for collodion compounds.