LECTURE X

DYESTUFFS AND COLOURS—­Continued

Artificial Substantive Dyestuffs.—­You may remember that in the last lecture we divided the colouring matters as follows:  I. Substantive colours, fixing themselves directly on animal fibres without a mordant, only a few of them doing this, however, on vegetable fibres, like cotton.  We sub-divided them further as—­(a) those occurring in nature, and (b) those prepared artificially, and chiefly, but not entirely, the coal-tar colouring matters.  II.  Adjective colours, fixing themselves only in conjunction with a mordant or mordants on animal or vegetable fibres, and including all the polygenetic colours.  III.  Mineral or pigment colours.  I described experiments to illustrate what we mean by monogenetic and polygenetic colours, and indicating that the monogenetic colours are mainly included in the group of substantive colours, whilst the polygenetic colours are mainly included in the adjective colours.  But I described also an illustration of Group III., the mineral or pigment colours, by which we may argue that chromate of lead is a polygenetic mineral colour, for, according to the treatment, we were able to obtain either chrome yellow (neutral lead chromate) or chrome orange (basic lead chromate).  I also said there was a kind of borderland whichever mode of classification be adopted.  Thus, for example, there are colours that are fixed on the fibre either directly like indigo, and so are substantive, or they may be, and generally are, applied with a mordant like the adjective and polygenetic colours; examples of these are Coerulein, Alizarin Blue, and a few more.  We have now before us a vast territory, namely, that of the b group of substantive colours, or, the largest proportion, indeed almost all of those prepared from coal-tar sources; Alizarin, also prepared from coal-tar, belongs to the adjective colours.  With regard to the source of these coal-tar colours, the word “coal-tar,” I was going to say, speaks volumes, for the destructive and dry distillation of coal in gas retorts at the highest temperatures to yield illuminating gas, also yields us tar.  But, coal distilled at lower temperatures, as well as shale, as in Scotland, will yield tar, but tar of another kind, from which colour-generating substances cannot be obtained practically, but instead, paraffin oil and paraffin wax for making candles, etc.  Coal-tar contains a very large number of different substances, but only a few of them can be extracted profitably for colour-making.  All the useful sources of colours and dyes from coal-tar are simply compounds of carbon and hydrogen—­hydrocarbons, as they are called, with the exception of one, namely, phenol, or carbolic acid.  I am not speaking here of those coal-tar constituents useful for making dyes, but of those actually extracted from coal-tar for that purpose, i.e. extracted to profit.