l workman from shock and a surgeon from
infection. Rubber beds and cushions filled with air are a great
comfort in illness. Rubber has great and important uses; but we should
perhaps miss quite as much the little comforts and conveniences which
it has made possible.

Rubber and gutta-percha are not the same substance by any means.
Both of them are made of the milky juice of trees, but of entirely
different trees. The gutta-percha milk is collected in an absurdly
wasteful manner, namely, by cutting down the trees and scraping up
the juice. When this juice reaches the market, it is in large reddish
lumps which look like cork and smell like cheese. It has to be
cleaned, passed through a machine that tears it into bits, then
between rollers before it is ready to be manufactured. It is not
elastic like rubber; it may be stretched; but it will not snap back
again as rubber does. It is a remarkably good nonconductor of
electricity, and therefore it has been generally used to protect ocean
cables, though recently rubber has been taking its place. It makes
particularly excellent casts, for when it is warm it is not sticky,
but softens so perfectly that it will show the tiniest indentation of
a mould. It is the best kind of splint for a broken bone. If a boy
breaks his arm, a surgeon can put a piece of gutta-percha into hot
water, set the bone, bind on the softened gutta-percha for a splint,
and in a few minutes it will be moulded to the exact shape of the arm,
but so stiff as to keep the bone in place. Another good service which
gutta-percha renders to the physician results from its willingness
to dissolve in chloroform. If the skin is torn off, leaving a raw
surface, this dissolved gutta-percha can be poured over it, and soon
it is protected by an artificial skin which keeps the air from the raw
flesh and gives the real skin an opportunity to grow again.

III

"KID" GLOVES

There is an old proverb which says, "For a good glove, Spain must
dress the leather, France must cut it, and England must sew it." Many
pairs of most excellent gloves have never seen any one of these
countries, but the moral of the proverb remains, namely, that it takes
considerable work and care to make a really good glove.

The first gloves made in the United States were of thick buckskin, for
there was much heavy work to be done in the forest and on the land.
The skin was tanned in Indian fashion, by rubbing into the flesh side
the brains o