[Illustration:  FIG. 15.

     1.  Natural wool fibre unproofed.

     2.  Wool fibre showing proof on surface, filling up the cells
     and rendering the same dye-proof.

     3.  Fur fibre from surface of veneered felt, showing dye
     deposited in cells and on the surface, bright and lustrous.

     4.  Wool fibre as in No. 2, with dye deposited on surface of
     proof.

     5.  Section of proofed and veneered body, showing unproofed
     surface.

     6.  Section of proofed body without “veneer.”]

LECTURE VIII

MORDANTS:  THEIR NATURE AND USE

The name or word “mordant” indicates the empiricism, or our old friend “the rule of thumb,” of the age in which it was first created and used.  It serves as a landmark of that age, which, by the way, needed landmarks, for it was an age of something between scientific twilight and absolute darkness. Morder in French, derived from the Latin mordere, means “to bite,” and formerly the users of mordants in dyeing and printing believed their action to be merely a mechanical action, that is, that they exerted a biting or corroding influence, serving to open the pores of the fabrics, and thus to give more ready ingress to the colour or dye.

Most mordants are salts, or bodies resembling salts, and hence we must commence our study of mordants by a consideration of the nature of salts.  I have already told you that acids are characterised by what we term an acid reaction upon certain vegetable and artificial colours, whilst bases or basic substances in solution, especially alkalis, restore those colours, or turn them to quite another shade; the acids do the one thing, and the alkalis and soluble bases do the opposite.  The strongest and most soluble bases are the alkalis—­soda, potash, and ammonia.  You all know, probably, that a drop of vitriol allowed to fall on a black felt hat will stain that hat red if the hat has been dyed with logwood black; and if you want to restore the black, you can do this by touching the stain with a drop of strong ammonia.  But the use of a black felt hat as a means of detecting acidity or alkalinity would not commend itself to an economic mind, and we find a very excellent reagent for the purpose in extract of litmus or litmus tincture, as well as in blotting paper stained therewith.  The litmus is turned bright red by acids and blue by alkalis.  If the acid is exactly neutralised by, that is combined with, the alkaline base to form fully neutralised salts, the litmus paper takes a purple tint.  Coloured reagents such as litmus are termed indicators.  A substance called phenolphthalein, a coal-tar product, is a very delicate indicator; it is more sensitive to acids than litmus is.  Now there are some salts which contain a preponderance of acid in their composition, i.e. in which the acid has not been fully neutralised by