Travels in Search of New Trade Products - Arthur Robottom

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1893 edition. Excerpt: ...interesting and most varied process. There we have hundreds of plain shades, different styles of mottling, such as spots, small and large, stripes, checks, imitation of buffalo horn, shellac, and ordinary mottling combined, handpainted, and lots of different imitations. A good experienced stainer can command good wages, as there are not many in the trade. The stained buttons are dried in stoves by a low temperature to prevent them from splitting, and then go into the polishing barrel again to finish. Certain patterns which are to be deep are not finished in the barrel but have to be polished by hand. The buttons are then ready for the carders, who have to shade them up first before carding them, as there is a little variation in each shade, which we attribute to the difference in the nature of the nuts. We have now come to the finishing part, as: boxing, labelling, packing, directing, &c. ' Four or five years ago, we introduced dull and bright buttons, and have quite a good trade. The dull surface is done by a sandblasting process where the bright places are protected. Nearly every gentleman you now meet wears buttons made from the coroza nut. Another excellent trade was the ladies' dress button, but this has been cut down of late years. Dr. Yeats, in his "Natural History of Commerce," gives the following technical description of vegetable ivory: --" Vegetable Ivory.--Corozo nuts. /Phytelephas macrocarjra; natural order Phytelephanteaz. The phytelephas, 2o feet in height, resembles a dwarf palm, with a majestic tuft of pinnate leaves; it is a native of the low valleys of South America, between 9 deg. north and 8 deg. south latitude and between 70 deg. and 79 deg. west longitude. Its nuts are enclosed in a...