examination was appointed, to whom M. Perrie
submitted a packet of his dried wild herbs. After
several months of investigation the committee
reported, and the Minister of Agriculture has
lately informed M. Perrie, that besides having
the taste, smell, and colour of the best China
teas, his new infusion is tonic and slightly
astringent. The grand question of price was all
that required to be elucidated. To this the
botanist replied, that his plant was a common
weed, and even if cultivated could be produced
for about twopence a pound, one pound yielding
five hundred cups. Will this induce the French
to become tea-drinkers? Mr. Simmonds, in
his excellent work about Waste Products
and Undeveloped Substances, gives a list of
as many as ninety-eight plants furnishing
in different countries infusions that are used
as substitutes for tea. Strawberry-leaves dried
in the sun or on hot plates, with or without a
dash of black-currant leaf added to represent an
aromatic green, make, it is said, no bad imitation
of a China tea, and at least a more agreeable and
refreshing infusion than the cheap tea usually
sold to the poor. It has also been suggested
that when we are next troubled with potato
famine, we may eat the dahlia roots. The raw
dahlia root is bitter like the raw potato, but
like the potato when properly boiled it becomes
mild and mealy. There certainly would be a
trifling difference at present between the cost of
a dish of boiled potatoes and that of a dish of
boiled dahlia roots, but cultivation of the dahlia
might alter that; and think of the gorgeousness
of Tipperary landscape when the potato has
been superseded, and the dahlia fields are all in
blossom! It is worth an artist's while never to
eat potatoes, but teach his cook to boil a dahlia
root to perfection, and never admit to his table
any other than this sort of new potato until our
own landscapes become gorgeous in autumn with
plum-coloured and claret-coloured fields.

An immense number of German cigars are
made of beet and turnip-leaves. When the cook
of the future shall have peeled her dahlias, and
proceeded to cut the tops from her turnips (if
turnips be not then superseded), the intelligent
boy in buttons will readily perceive how, by the
help of a frying-pan, he can become the maker of
his own cigars. He will not throw those turnip-
tops into the dust-hole.

We hear a good deal of substitutes for cotton.
A partial substitute for it in one or two of its
forms has been got in Silesia by use of a "woody
wool," made in a factory near Breslau, from the
young pointed leaves of the pine-trees. There is
another establishment close by, built by the same
speculator, M. Pannewitz, in which the waters
got from the manufacture of the pine wool are used
medicinally. There is another such wool factory
at Remda, in the Thuringian forest. The pine-
leaves are bundles of tough woody fibre, bound
together by a resinous coating. Boiled and re-
boiled in caustic alkali, and bleached afterwards
by steeping in chloride of lime, they yield a fine
wool wadding, that maybe curled, felted, or woven.
This material was very soon tried as a substitute
for cotton with animal wool, in the making of
blankets; and five hundred of the blankets were
sold to an hospital in Vienna, where they are
exclusively used. It is said that no insect will go
to bed under such blankets, although their smell
is wholesome and pleasant to the human nose.
The same kind of blanket is now used in the
penitentiary at Vienna, and in the barracks at
Breslau. The pine-leaf fibre can also be
prepared into an exact imitation of horse-hair at a
third of the price, and the same material is spun,
as forest yarn, into jackets, drawers, shirts, stockings,
sometimes made to resemble hempen fabrics,
sometimes flannel. In making this wool, the oil
got is used as a medicine, as a solvent of india-
rubber, for lamps, or—being colourless when
distilled—is sold to the Parisian perfumers. The
alkaline liquid in which the pine-leaves have been
boiled, is brought into use as a medicinal bath;
the membranous refuse is compressed into blocks
of artificial fuel, which is resinous enough to be
used in making all the gas that lights the factory
wherein so much industry is got out of what
used to be thought the commercially useless part
of a fir-tree.

These are clear economies. But who will
believe that in any civilised parts of the world it
is economy to keep up the fires with bread
instead of coal, and to make gas out of sugar?
Not that the coal-scuttle is filled with dinner
rolls, or sugar-basins emptied into the
gasometer; but in the prairies of Illinois maize corn
was, before the civil war, thirteen or fourteen
cents a bushel, and coal ranged from twelve to
seventeen cents, so that it was generally cheaper
to burn corn than coal; corn having also the
advantage that it would give out more heat. As
for the sugar gas, in the West Indies, a Mr. Stammers
has found that he can get a cubic yard of gas
out of about two pounds and a half of molasses.
In making beetroot sugar, also, the refuse of the
beetroot will make gas enough to light the factory.

It is said that the Moors of the desert keep up
the flame of life in themselves for six weeks at a
time, during the gum harvest, upon gum-arabic
alone, and six ounces of gum-arabic are said to
have been found experimentally to be enough to
support a man for four-and-twenty hours. That
quantity would make two tumblers of stiff
mucilage, and it may be worth an economist's
while to try how jolly he can make himself upon
such diet, and ascertain also, from a phrenologist
after a month of it, whether it has brought out
his organ of adhesiveness. Probably, however,
it would be found in a few days that he could
not be got to stick to his diet, especially as in
England six ounces of gum cost about the price
of a half-quartern loaf, a mutton chop, a slice of
cheese, a lettuce, and a pint of porter, all together.
We might throw into the bargain half a pound of
the new French tea or a few ounces of acorn coffee.

"Acorns," says the recent French introducer
of the acorn coffee, "were for a long time the