m*- w - Clpdigital.org

*^
CAMPHOR—A NEW AMERICAN INDUSTRY 219
f
The Leaves and Berries
These give two per cent of crude
camphor when boiled.
A Cake of Refined Camphor
as It Is Sold Commercially
ing its personality
and permitting itself
to be ground out by
machinery, much
after the fashion of
bologna sausage.
Consequently it opened a new
chapter of its romance by presenting
a new angle that completely
put out of business the
commercial concerns that had
wielded the synthetic product
to break the Japanese monopoly. And
so the maker of artificial camphor followed
the other victims of this commercial
Lorelei, the native camphor-gatherer,
the head-hunter and the Japanese monopolist,
into oblivion. While some of
the manufacturers of synthetic camphor
indicate their determination to
hold on, most of them quietly struck
their tents and sought other fields.
The efficient German was first into
the field and first out. Because
of the tremendous demand
for turpentine, because
of its constantly increasing
cost, and because of the growing
scarcity of the pine tree
from which turpentine is se­
cured, the Germans realized
some time ago that the latest
development in camphor production made
it i.nwise to continue the manufacture of
synthetic camphor.
As may be expected the latest kink in
the production of camphor effects as
radical a revolution in the industry as
any of its previous eccentricities.
Some years ago a Yankee agricultural
student got a notion that if there was
camphor in the camphor tree there was
camphor in the camphor brush. So he
planted camphor trees and then cut them
down when the brush reached a height
of about two feet. Sure enough, he
found traces of camphor in the cut brush,
but not in quantities sufficient to justify
its harvesting as a commercial
proposition.
But, figured other
Americans, and Englishmen,
too, if there is camphor
in the brush there
must be camphor in the
leaves and the twigs. So
tests were made almost
simultaneously in America,
in Malaya and in
East Africa. The test camphor
wood, twigs and leaves were
shipped from Jamaica for the
American experiments and determinations.
The results obtained
at the University of Kansas
showed the following percentage
Chopping a Camphor Tree to Pieces for the Purpose of Distilling
the Chips—the Aboriginal Method