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Updated: May 1, 2025
The scenery of a long tragic drama flashed through his mind as the lightning-express-train whishes by a station: the gradual dismantling process of disease; friends looking on, sympathetic, but secretly chuckling over their own stomachs of iron and lungs of caoutchouc; nurses attentive, but calculating their crop, and thinking how soon it will be ripe, so that they can go to your neighbor, who is good for a year or so longer; doctors assiduous, but giving themselves a mental shake, as they go out of your door, that throws off your particular grief as a duck sheds a rain-drop from his oily feathers; undertakers solemn, but happy; then the great subsoil cultivator, who plants, but never looks for fruit in his garden; then the stone-cutter, who finds the lie that has been waiting for you on a slab ever since the birds or beasts made their tracks on the new red sandstone; then the grass and the dandelions and the buttercups, Earth saying to the mortal body, with her sweet symbolism, "You have scarred my bosom, but you are forgiven"; then a glimpse of the soul as a floating consciousness without very definite form or place, but dimly conceived of as an upright column of vapor or mist several times larger than life-size, so far as it could be said to have any size at all, wandering about and living a thin and half-awake life for want of good old-fashioned solid matter to come down upon with foot and fist, in fact, having neither foot nor fist, nor conveniences for taking the sitting posture.
In the rectified state, it has been successfully used in the preparation of lacs for the best kinds of varnish; in lamps it burns as well as olive-oil; and it dissolves caoutchouc completely and speedily. Already the perfumers of Paris make large use of this pine-oil.
All the white and newly prepared caoutchouc, as well as the waterproof cloaks, manufactured in Spanish America by placing a layer of milk of hevea between two pieces of cloth, exhale an animal and nauseating smell. This seems to indicate that the caoutchouc, in coagulating, carries with it the caseum, which is perhaps only an altered albumen.
Advancing to more general considerations, we may regard, with M. Gay-Lussac, the caoutchouc as the oily part the butter of vegetable milk. We find in the milk of plants caseum and caoutchouc; in the milk of animals, caseum and butter. The proportions of the two albuminous and oily principles differ in the various species of animals and of lactescent plants.
The seringa-tree differs greatly from the group of plants which furnish the caoutchouc of Africa and the West Indies; the latter being the product of certain species of ficus of a climbing character, and inferior to the india-rubber of South America. Among the noblest of the forest monarchs appears a tree with deeply-scored reddish and ragged bark.
And then all the promises which had been made him had not been kept. The caoutchouc jumping-jacks, the humming-birds, all those seemed constantly to recede. There had also been a question of showing him the most beautiful parrots in the world, and they ought not to be wanting in these rich forests.
A yellowish-white caoutchouc is now to be found in the shops, which may be easily distinguished from the dapicho, because it is neither dry like cork, nor friable, but extremely elastic, glossy, and soapy. I lately saw considerable quantities of it in London. This caoutchouc, white, and greasy to the touch, is prepared in the East Indies.
People who leave the scene of an accident with the ambulance have not genuine caoutchouc in the cosmogony of their necks. The delicate, fine flavour of the affair is to be had only in the after-taste in gloating over the spot, in gazing fixedly at the houses opposite, in hovering there in a dream more exquisite than the opium-eater's ecstasy.
With the means thus accruing I proceeded to procure at intervals, cambric muslin, very fine, in pieces of twelve yards each; twine; a lot of the varnish of caoutchouc; a large and deep basket of wicker-work, made to order; and several other articles necessary in the construction and equipment of a balloon of extraordinary dimensions.
"I think Racine's boring," said Mrs. Lockton, "he's so artificial." "Oh! don't say that," said Giles, "Racine is the most exquisite of poets, so sensitive, so acute, and so harmonious." "I like Rostand better," said Mrs. Lockton. "Rostand!" exclaimed Miss Tring, in disgust, "he writes such bad verses du caoutchouc he's so vulgar." "It is true," said Willmott, "he's an amateur.
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