of salt cake charged, there are also charged about 110 tons of lime mud and limestone and 55 tons of mixing slack.  In a week of seven days about 48 charges are worked through, weighing of raw materials about 25 tons per charge.  The total amount of salt cake decomposed weekly is about 400 tons, and may be reckoned as yielding 240 tons of 60 per cent. caustic soda.  As regards fuel used for firing, this may be put down as 200 tons per week, or about 10 cwt. per ton of salt cake decomposed.  Also with regard to the concentration of liquor from 20 deg.  Tw. to 50 deg.  Tw., there is sufficient of such concentrated liquor evaporated down to keep three self-fired caustic pots working, which are boiled at a strength of 80 deg.  Tw.  Were it not for this liquor, no less than seven self-fired pots would be required to do this work, showing a difference of 80 tons of fuel.

[Illustration:  A NEW MONSTER REVOLVING BLACK ASH FURNACE. (2 Figures.) ]

The question may be asked, “Why increase the size of these huge pieces of apparatus?” The answer, I apprehend, is that owing to competition and reduction of prices, greater efforts are necessary to reduce costs.  With automatic apparatus like the black ash revolver, we may consider no very sensible addition of man power would be needed, in passing from the smallest sized to the largest sized revolver.  Then, again, we may, reckoning a certain constant amount of heat lost per each revolver furnace of the small size, consider that if we doubled the size of such revolver, we should lose by no means double the amount of heat lost with the small apparatus; but only the same as that lost in the small furnace plus a certain fraction of that quantity, which will be smaller the better and more efficient the arrangements are.  Then, again, there is an economy in iron plate for such a large revolver; there is economy in expense on the engine power and on fuel consumed, as well as in wear and tear.

Just to mention fuel alone, we saw that with an ordinary large sized revolver, the coal consumption was 13 cwt. per ton of salt cake decomposed in the black ash process; but with the giant revolver we have been describing, that consumption is reduced to 10 cwt. per ton of cake decomposed.

[Illustration:  A NEW MONSTER REVOLVING BLACK ASH FURNACE. (2 Figures.)]

The question will be probably asked, How is it possible to get a flame from one furnace to carry through such a long revolver and do its work in fusing the black ash mixture effectively from one end to the other?  The furnace employed viewed in front looks very like an ordinary revolver fireplace, but at the side thereof, in line with the front of the revolver, at which the discharge of the “crude soda” takes place, there are observed to be three “charging holes,” rather than doors, through which fuel is charged from a platform directly into the furnace through those holes.