en lengths of cotton or flax
fibre, or rushes from which most of the external skin had been stripped,
only sufficient being left to support the pith ("rushlights"), were
dipped into it, the operation being repeated until the desired thickness
had been attained. In Paris, in the 13th century, there was a gild of
candlemakers who went from house to house to make tallow candles, the
manufacture of wax candles being in the hands of another gild. This
separation of the two branches of the trade is also exemplified by the
existence of two distinct livery companies in the city of London--the
Waxchandlers and the Tallowchandlers; the French _chandelle_ properly
means tallow candle, candles made of materials less fusible than tallow
being called _bougies_, a term said to be derived from the town of
Bougie in Algeria, either because wax was produced there or because the
Venetians imported wax candles thence into Europe. The old tallow "dips"
gave a poor light, and tallow itself is now used only to a limited
extent, except as a source of "stearine." This is the trade name for a
mixture of solid fatty acids--mainly stearic and palmitic--manufactured
not only from tallow and other animal fats, but also from such vegetable
fats as palm-oil. Paraffin wax, a mixture of solid hydrocarbons obtained
from crude North American and Rangoon petroleum, and also yielded in
large quantities by the Scotch shale oil industry, is, at least in Great
Britain, a still more important material of candle-manufacture, which
came into use about 1854. Spermaceti, a crystalline fatty substance
obtained from the sperm whale (_Physeter macrocephalus_), was introduced
as a material for candles about a century earlier. In practice the
candlemaker mostly uses mixtures of these materials. For instance, 5-10%
of stearine, which is used alone for candles that have to be burnt in
hot climates, is mixed with paraffin wax, to counteract the tendency to
bend with heat exhibited by the latter substance. Again, the brittleness
of spermaceti is corrected by the addition of beeswax, stearine,
paraffin wax or ceresin (obtained from the mineral wax ozocerite). In
some "composite" candles stearine is mixed with the hard fat ("cocoa-nut
stearine") expressed from cocoa-nut oil by hydraulic pressure; and this
cocoa-nut stearine is also used for night-lights, which are short thick
candles with a thin wick, calculated to burn from six to ten hours.

The stearine or stearic acid indu