ries then
made by M. Chevreuil, the famous centenarian dean of French science, as
to the nature and properties of fatty substances. At the outset these
works were taken up with the manufacture of stearine candles; but as in
the case of the glass works of St.-Gobain, the chemical processes
employed in creating one particular product were soon found to yield
other very different and not less valuable results. I shall not attempt
to enter into the mysteries of saponification and distillation, which
cease to be mysteries when they are followed up from point to point
through the extensive and orderly organisation of the Fournier Works;
suffice it that at these works 600 men and 400 women are busily employed
in turning every year 13,000 tons of African palm-oil, and of
Australian, Russian, French, and American tallow into stearine candles,
oleine, and glycerine. The output is enormous, amounting annually to
20,000,000 packets of candles of an average weight of 400 grammes a
packet, to 3,300,000 kilogrammes of oleine, and to 1,200,000 kilogrammes
of glycerine. How much of this latter product goes to the pharmacies and
how much to the powder magazines of the world it is not easy to say. But
it is easy to see that if the Bouches-du-Rhone get the better of the
Calvados in the politics of France, there will be a serious falling off
in the demand for altar lights and chamber candles, and a still more
serious increase in the demand for nitro-glycerine!

The output of the Fournier Works represents about one-fourth of the
whole stearine and glycerine production of France, and as paraffin has
of late years largely taken the place of stearine in the famous Price
Works in England, the Fournier Works are now doubtless the most
important of their kind in the world. Thirty years ago the candles
produced here were almost all exported; now the home consumption just
about equals the exportation, a fact as to which the truly paternal
Government of France takes pains to leave no doubt in the minds of the
producers by taxing candles heavily as an 'article of luxury.' They are
subjected to a regie like cigars, and to the octroi, and these imposts,
M. Fournier tells me, now amount to about fifty per cent, of their
value. A knowledge of this circumstance may, perhaps, divert the wrath
of travellers in France from the hotel-keeper, who claps a couple of
francs for bougies into your bill if you pass half a summer's day in his
house, to the Government