Good kermes is plump, of a deep red colour, of an agreeable smell, and a rough and pungent taste. Its colouring matter is soluble in water and alcohol; it becomes yellowish or brownish with acids, and violet or crimson with alkalis. Sulphate of iron blackens it. With alum it dyes a blood-red; with copperas an agate gray; with copperas and tartar, a lively gray; with sulphate of copper and tartar, an olive green; with tartar and salt of tin, a lively cinnamon yellow; with more alum and tartar, a lilac; with sulphate of zinc and tartar, a violet. Scarlet and crimson dyed with kermes, were called grain colours; and they are reckoned to be more durable than those of cochineal, as is proved by the brilliancy of the old Brussels tapestry.
Hellot says that previous to dyeing in the kermes bath, he threw a handful of wool into it, in order to extract a blackish matter, which would have tarnished the colour. The red caps for the Levant are dyed at Orleans with equal parts of kermes and madder; and occasionally with the addition of some Brazil wood.
[Cochineal] and [lac-dye] have now nearly superseded the use of kermes as a tinctorial substance, in England.
KILLAS, is the name by which clay-slate is known among the Cornish miners.
KILN; (Four, Fr.; Ofen, Germ.) is the name given to various forms of furnaces and stoves, by which an attempered heat may be applied to bodies; thus there are brick-kilns, hop-kilns, lime-kilns, malt-kilns, pottery-kilns. Hop and malt kilns, being designed merely to expel the moisture of the vegetable matter, may be constructed in the same way. See [Brick], [Limestone], [Malt], [Pottery], for a description of their respective kilns.
KINIC ACID; a peculiar acid extracted by Vauquelin from cinchona.
KINO, is an extractive matter obtained from the nauclea gambir, a shrub which grows at Bancoul and Sumatra, but principally in Prince of Wales’ Island. It is of a reddish-brown colour, has a bitter styptic taste, and consists chiefly of tannin. It is used only as an astringent in medicine. Kino is often called a gum, but most improperly.
KIRSCHWASSER, is an alcoholic liquor obtained by fermenting and distilling bruised cherries, called kirschen in German. The cherry usually employed in Switzerland and Germany is a kind of morello, which on maturation becomes black, and has a kernel very large in proportion to its pulp. When ripe, the fruit being made to fall by switching the trees, is gathered by children, thrown promiscuously, unripe, ripe, and rotten into tubs, and crushed either by hand, or with a wooden beater. The mashed materials are set to ferment, and whenever this process is complete, the whole is transferred to an old still covered with verdigris, and the spirit is run off in the rudest manner possible, by placing the pot over the common fire-place.
The fermented mash is usually mouldy before it is put into the alembic, the capital of which is luted on with a mixture of mud and dung. The liquor has accordingly, for the most part, a rank smell, and is most dangerous to health, not only from its own crude essential oil, but from the prussic acid, derived from the distillation of the cherry-stones.
There is a superior kind of kirschwasser made in the Black Forest, prepared with fewer kernels, from choice fruit, properly pressed, fermented, and distilled.