was of enormous importance and
the practical application of this new chemical in bleaching cloth soon
supplanted the old process of crofting--that is, bleaching by spreading
the cloth upon the grass. But although Scheele first pointed out the
bleaching quality of his newly discovered gas, it was the French savant,
Berthollet, who, acting upon Scheele's discovery that the new gas would
decolorize vegetables and flowers, was led to suspect that this property
might be turned to account in destroying the color of cloth. In 1785 he
read a paper before the Academy of Sciences of Paris, in which he showed
that bleaching by chlorine was entirely satisfactory, the color but
not the substance of the cloth being affected. He had experimented
previously and found that the chlorine gas was soluble in water and
could thus be made practically available for bleaching purposes. In 1786
James Watt examined specimens of the bleached cloth made by Berthollet,
and upon his return to England first instituted the process of practical
bleaching. His process, however, was not entirely satisfactory, and,
after undergoing various modifications and improvements, it was finally
made thoroughly practicable by Mr. Tennant, who hit upon a compound of
chlorine and lime--the chloride of lime--which was a comparatively cheap
chemical product, and answered the purpose better even than chlorine
itself.

To appreciate how momentous this discovery was to cloth manufacturers,
it should be remembered that the old process of bleaching consumed an
entire summer for the whitening of a single piece of linen; the new
process reduced the period to a few hours. To be sure, lime had been
used with fair success previous to Tennant's discovery, but successful
and practical bleaching by a solution of chloride of lime was first made
possible by him and through Scheele's discovery of chlorine.

Until the time of Scheele the great subject of organic chemistry had
remained practically unexplored, but under the touch of his marvellous
inventive genius new methods of isolating and studying animal and
vegetable products were introduced, and a large number of acids and
other organic compounds prepared that had been hitherto unknown. His
explanations of chemical phenomena were based on the phlogiston theory,
in which, like Priestley, he always, believed. Although in error in
this respect, he was, nevertheless, able to make his discoveries with
extremely accurate interpretations