Trades: Natural Product and Rule of Thumb From Our Own Correspondent, Haichow, June 7.
Several weeks ago while visiting a small market town 60 miles southeast of Haichow I saw a man Squatting and scraping the surface of the ground with an iron scraper. As he was gathering neither manure nor fuel I asked what he was doing and he replied "kwa hsiao" and to my astonished, "What?" he replied by a hopeless gesture and said, "Oh I can't ex plain it to you" and went on with his scraping.
Others, however, engaged in the same work were more patient with my inquiries and found hat "kwa hsiao" means "'scraping saltpetre," a regular industry in this town handed down from generation to generation, no one knows how long, and showing the simple practical ingenuity of the people at its best. The town itself is one straggling street a quarter of a mile long with dwellings piastered up against the rear of the small dingy shops with that total lack of plan that characterizes every Chinese village, but which yet permits all of them to look alike. "A few feet further back runs the inevitable moat bordered liberally with manure piles. Incredible as it seems, this very narrow territory, trodden every hour by scores of feet, has yielded, still yields and bids fair to yield for ever a sufficient supply of saltpetre for the makers of powder and firecrackers in the vicinity, Wuere Ir Comes From.
Where does it all come from? Everyone has seen now and then an occasional semi-barren plot of land covered over with a whitish glaze, commonly called soda land or alkali patches. These in the future will recarve my more respect-jul attention for it is just these little skims of alkali that furnish the unfailing supply of saltpetre.
Apparently the ground beneath contains an inexhaustible supply of saltpetre which is dissolved by the racisture in the earth and rises with the same by capillary action to the surface. The water evaporates and leaves the saltpetre in a thick skin on the surface. It will be at once evident that such continued scraping would eventually lower the levi of the ground, reducing it to a succession of pits. But no, the dirt after having been treated and the saltpetre extracted is thawn out on the same place whence it came_and is better than fresh dirt, as it permits the more rapid passage of the moisture up through it. This comes very near beating the general law of physics that the more you take out the less you have left!
The process of treatment is absurdly simple. The scrapings are dumped into a stone jar, a bucket of water thrown-on it and_ there leaks out at a small hole in the bottom a clear brown liquid, resembling -lye. In fact there must be some lye in it for a spadeful of ashes is added to the dirt - to "start the dissolving," though a chemist would doubtless assign it a more important role.
This liquid is then evaporated in an ordinary kettle and long benmtiful crystals are formed, which are dipped out and heated again, with a resultant cake of-dazzling whi ness, which on d..e @xamination is seen to be made up of minute crystals,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.