Selections from essays on health-culture and the sanitary woolen system / by Gustav Jaeger ... (Tr. from the German.).

  • Gustav Jäger
Date:
1891
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Selections from essays on health-culture and the sanitary woolen system / by Gustav Jaeger ... (Tr. from the German.). Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University Libraries/Information Services, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University.

    213/232 (page 201)
    hand, the cotton fibre is tape-like, resembling a flat- tened tube, devoid of the cross lines, and generally somewhat twisted, like an auger. A tuft taken from the spurious article, so closely resembling the genuine that none but the most skilled expert would even suspect anything wrong, shows, under the glass, the woolen and cotton fibres interlaced, in the proportion of about 331 per cent, of the latter. But the chemical test is by far the more striking. A remnant of the Jaeger fabric, thrown into a strong, hot solution of caustic soda, wholly disappears in a few seconds, leaving only a brownish liquid behind— the discoloration being due to the decomposition of the dark-hued wool, which, when mixed with the white, gives the ' natural-gray' color. The almost pure gelatine, of which the woolen fibre is composed, is rapidly dissolved in the caustic solution, while upon the cotton fibre the solution has no appreciable eifect. So, when a clipping from the imitation garment is immersed in the solution, the woolen component at once disappears, leaving a patch of well-woven, cotton network behind, looking very much like a piece of fine mosquito-bar. [*] The result shows not only the grossness of the fraud, but the ingenuity with which it is perpetrated. — The Daily Standard- TJnion^ Brooklyn, N. Y. The cuts 1, 2 and 3 on pages 202, 203, represent microscopic views of the w^oolen and cotton fibres as revealed in the above-described analyses. *When, iu the adulterated fabric, the cotton fibre is not spun in with the woolen, the former will be found in the solution in the form of an entangled mass of filaments,