suit of clothes is worn
to rags, the rags are still as good as new, for the wool is picked out
into strands of fiber again and woven anew. It isn't ground into shoddy
as it was in the days of the Civil War.

The wool is picked apart as long as it has any staple to it at all, and
forms part of the most expensive and enduring of fabrics. It may be mixed
with cotton, but when it comes to be a rag again, the cotton is burned out
either with acid or with heat, the dust is taken out, and once more behold
absolutely pure wool, much safer to wear than the new wool of the tropics
and semi-tropics. When there is not enough wool to hold together it goes
into our clothing. With wood ashes and scrap iron it ceases to be a fabric
and becomes a dye, Prussian blue.

The cotton rag has no such long life. All it is good for is paper stock.
The paper business is essentially a wealth from waste industry. For a long
time, linen rags, cotton rags, and old rope were the only materials of
which paper was made. Cheap books and magazines and newspapers had to wait
until it was discovered that the resins and gums in which the fibers of
wood are imbedded could be dissolved away, leaving the pulp of the wood in
just the same condition that the pulp of rags was.

Where Old Magazines Go.

If the resins are not thoroughly dissolved away the paper turns brown in
the course of time. Naturally enough, the wood-pulp makers let the
solution of resins run off and become a nuisance, but they, too, are
learning that there are glucoses and pyroligneous acids and all manner of
riches to be obtained from the solution of the vegetable matter, to say
nothing of the possibilities of a sort of gum or glue which is softened
both by heat and by moisture.

And just a word about an economy found necessary by the magazines and
newspapers which take back the copies the newsdealer does not sell. These
"returns" were hard to get rid of. Paper is mean stuff to burn in
quantities. So far as the texture of the wood-pulp paper is concerned, it
might be used to print on again, but how are you going to remove the ink?
Let the ink stay on and use the pulp over again for pasteboard boxes. And
that's what becomes of the newspapers and magazines that nobody buys.

If you will look over journals devoted to concrete and its wonders, you
will see a good deal about the concrete made out of slag. And there was a
neat little point made when it was discovered that about two cents a