Portland cement is "the finely pulverized product resulting from the
calcination to incipient fusion of an intimate mixture of properly
proportioned argillaceous and calcareous materials and to which no
addition greater than 3 per cent has been made subsequent to
calcination."

That, in a word, is the keynote of H. Colin Campbell's "How to Use
Cement for Concrete Construction." In case you should never read any
more of the book, you would have that.

But to the reader who is not satisfied with this taste of the secret of
cement construction and who reads on into Mr. Campbell's work, there is
revealed a veritable mine of information. And in the light of the recent
turn of events one might even call it significant. (Any turn of events
will do.)

* * * * *

The first chapter is given over to a plea for concrete. Judging from the
claims made for concrete by Mr. Campbell, it will accomplish everything
that a return to Republican administration would do, and wouldn't be
anywhere near so costly. It will make your barn fireproof; it will
insure clean milk for your children; it will provide a safe housing for
your automobile. Farm prosperity and concrete go hand in hand.

In case there are any other members of society who have been with me in
thinking that Portland cement is a product of Portland, Me., or
Portland, Ore., it might as well be stated right here and now that
America had nothing to do with the founding of the industry, and that
the lucky Portland is an island off the south coast of England.

It was a bright sunny afternoon in May, 1824, when Joseph Aspdin, an
intelligent bricklayer of Leeds, England, was carelessly calcining a
mixture of limestone and clay, as bricklayers often do on their days
off, that he suddenly discovered, on reducing the resulting clinker to a
powder, that this substance, on hardening, resembled nothing so much as
the yellowish-gray stone found in the quarries on the Isle of Portland.
(How Joe knew what grew on the Isle of Portland when his home was in
Leeds is not explained. Maybe he spent his summers at the Portland
House, within three minutes of the bathing beach.)

At any rate, on discovering the remarkable similarity between the mess
he had cooked up and Portland stone, he called to his wife and said:
"Eunice, come here a minute! What does this remind you of?"

The usually cheerful brow of Eunice Aspdin clouded for the fraction of a
second.

"That