will decompose it and set free boric acid. Boric acid is obtained
chiefly from Italy. In a tract of country called the Maremma of Tuscany,
embracing an area of about forty square miles, are numerous chasms and
crevices, from which hot vapour and heated gases and springs of water
spurt. The steam issuing from these hot springs contains small
quantities of boric acid, that acid being one of those solid substances
distilling to some extent in a current of steam. The steam vapours thus
bursting forth, owing to some kind of constant volcanic disturbance, are
also more or less laden with sulphuretted hydrogen gas, communicating a
very ill odour to the neighbourhood. These phenomena were at first
looked upon by the people as the work of the devil, and priestly
exorcisms were in considerable request in the hope of quelling them,
very much as a great deal of the mere speech-making at the present time
in England on foreign competition and its evils, and the dulness of
trade, the artificial combinations to keep up prices, to reduce wages,
general lamentation, etc., are essayed in the attempt to charm away bad
trade. At length a kind of prophet arose of a very practical character
in the form of the late Count Lardarel, who, mindful of the fact that
the chemist Hoeffer, in the time of the Grand Duke Leopold I., had
discovered boric acid in the volcanic steam jets, looked hopefully
beyond the exorcisms of the priests and the superstitions of the people
to a possible blessing contained in what appeared to be an unholy
confusion of Nature. He constructed tanks of from 100 to 1000 ft. in
diameter and 7 to 20 ft. in depth, of such a kind that the steam jets
were surrounded by or contained in them, and thus the liquors formed by
condensation became more and more concentrated. These tanks were
arranged at different levels, so that the liquors could be run off from
one to the other, and finally to settling cisterns. Subsequently the
strong liquors were run to lead-lined, wooden vats, in which the boric
acid was crystallised out. Had the industry depended on the use of fuel
it could never have developed, but Count Lardarel ingeniously utilised
the heat of the steam for all the purposes, and neither coal nor wood
was required. Where would that Tuscan boric acid industry have been now
had merely the lamentations of landowners, fears of the people, and
exorcisms of the priests been continued? Instead of being the work of
the arch-enemy of manki