As might be expected, asbestos is also found in China, but, as a matter of course, the use to which it is put there is one we should little dream of here. For instance, in the translation of a Chinese medical book by Dr. Hobson, of the London Medical Mission, asbestos is seen to figure (of all places in the world) under the head of _tonics_, in company with such heterogeneous substances as "dried spotted lizard, silkworm moth, human milk, parasite of the mulberry tree, asses' glue, stalactite," and a few more surprising things. Perhaps it may be just as well for us that we are not yet educated up to so fine a point as that, and that consequently the mineral we are speaking of does not yet find a place in the British Pharmacopoeia, but is left to exhibit its apparently more natural properties in the arts and manufactures. A correspondent of _The Financial News_, writing from Barberton in January, 1888, says that at Komali Fields, fifty miles from that place, asbestos has just been found, but that it was as yet too soon to discuss the merits of the find. In sending you an account of the Canadian asbestos industry, you will scarcely expect me to give you any very detailed information about its Italian competitor. Any account of the one, however, would necessarily be so incomplete without some mention of the other, that I will do the best I can with the little information I have been enabled to obtain on the subject of the Italian mines. Experiments with the view of utilizing asbestos in Italy appear to have been first successfully carried on in 1850 by the Chevalier Aldini, of Milan, and others, mainly with the object of turning the mineral to account in the manufacture of asbestos cloth. The Chevalier had a complete suit made of it--cap, gloves, tunic, and stockings--for the purpose of testing its protective powers for firemen; and of this I shall have something to say presently.[3] But it was not until twenty years after this that any success was attained in the manufacture of asbestos millboard and paper, the commercial value of which is now assuming such large proportions. About the same time the manufacture of asbestos into packings for piston glands was successfully accomplished in America; and some two years afterwards a company, calling itself "The Patent Asbestos Manufacturing Company, Limited," was formed in Glasgow for the purpose of making piston packings according to this American invention. In 1880 this Glasgow Company united its business with that of Messrs. Furse Brothers and Co., of Rome, asbestos manufacturers, as well as with that of the Italo-English Pure Asbestos Company, and, when the amalgamation was complete, the new Company, taking the name of "The United Asbestos Company, Limited," became possessed of nearly the whole of the known Italian mines, and, consequently, of a practical monopoly of the trade in asbestos from that country.