Rensselaer Union, Volume 10, Number 26, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 14 March 1878 — Plenty of Arsenic. [ARTICLE]

Plenty of Arsenic.

A man, armed with a long iron hook, pulls open an iron door, and you gaze with awe into the Dantesque heart of a huge fierce furnace, the white-hot contents slowly turning round, and ever falling in cascades of yellow fire. It is found that at the works on Devon sulphur in the pyrites is enough to keep the furnace, when once heated, a burning without other fuel. The product? Here it is, a white heap of several tons of it lying in an open shed, where everybody passes by. It is something like fine flour. One" of the men dips thumb and fingers loosely into the white powder, puts a quantity into the palm of his other hand, and brings it to us to look at, precisely as a miller shows a sample of flour, smoothing it with his fore-finger. One expects every moment to see him test it with his -tongue; a child probably would, but the miner knows better. All this white heap is arsenic; all these rows of bar rels are filled with arsenic. More than 2,000 tons a year are sent out from this one mine, to be used mainly in those brilliant modern dyes by which our women and children can dazzle the sunshine at a cheap expense. Are they safe to wear? My chemistry books do not plainly say yes or no. But in one book I have chanced to open I find the following remarks: “ Arsenious Acid— White Oxide of Arsenic, or White_ Arsenic—This substance is of the highest importance, as being the frequent agent of criminal or accidental poisoning. * * * There are few substances so much to be feared, (it) being almost tasteless; it can be mixed with articles of food and swallowed without discovery, and there is no practically efficient antidote.” This innocentlooking white powder, this potent and fatal substance, of which your chemist must not sell you a dose without entering your name and address in a book; of which three grains weight will kill a man, was lying by one of the ordinary roads of the mine in open sheds, in heaps breast-high. 1 was assured that no kind of harm ever comes of all this (save skin eruptions to the work people, and these rarely), but it gave one a shiver to see those white mounds.— Fraser's Magazine.