Commercially this discovery of chlorine was of enormous importance and the practical application of this new chemical in bleaching cloth soon supplanted the old process of crofting--that is, bleaching by spreading the cloth upon the grass. But although Scheele first pointed out the bleaching quality of his newly discovered gas, it was the French savant, Berthollet, who, acting upon Scheele's discovery that the new gas would decolorize vegetables and flowers, was led to suspect that this property might be turned to account in destroying the color of cloth. In 1785 he read a paper before the Academy of Sciences of Paris, in which he showed that bleaching by chlorine was entirely satisfactory, the color but not the substance of the cloth being affected. He had experimented previously and found that the chlorine gas was soluble in water and could thus be made practically available for bleaching purposes. In 1786 James Watt examined specimens of the bleached cloth made by Berthollet, and upon his return to England first instituted the process of practical bleaching. His process, however, was not entirely satisfactory, and, after undergoing various modifications and improvements, it was finally made thoroughly practicable by Mr. Tennant, who hit upon a compound of chlorine and lime--the chloride of lime--which was a comparatively cheap chemical product, and answered the purpose better even than chlorine itself. To appreciate how momentous this discovery was to cloth manufacturers, it should be remembered that the old process of bleaching consumed an entire summer for the whitening of a single piece of linen; the new process reduced the period to a few hours. To be sure, lime had been used with fair success previous to Tennant's discovery, but successful and practical bleaching by a solution of chloride of lime was first made possible by him and through Scheele's discovery of chlorine.