------------------------------------------------------------- [3] See the case stated at length in our article on Trade-marks, Bulletin, vol. i. p. 102. ------------------------------------------------------------- To recur to the application of indigo dyeing to wool and woollens. We have been unable, although we have written more than fifty letters of inquiry upon the subject, to learn of any peculiarity or improvements in the American processes of wool dyeing with indigo.[4] Our dyers are for the most part foreigners. For this reason, or because the art of indigo dyeing has long since reached perfection in the best establishments abroad, they rigidly pursue the old European methods. The best dyers regard the successful management of the warm fermenting vats for wool as the highest test of their art. We have already spoken of the complicity of the phenomena in fermentations. Practical dyers endow the fermenting vat with a sort of personality. “An indigo vat,” says one to us, “is more like a sick man than any thing in the world: you have to watch it as you would a sick patient, and give it physic or ferments to stir up the system and purify it.” [5] The diagnosis of a sick vat requires that sort of instinctive knowledge which experience gives to the practised physician. The impatience of our young Americans will not permit them to serve the long apprenticeship necessary to acquire the proper experience. The artisans not thoroughly trained will naturally prefer the dyes and processes introduced by modern science, which require but little skill in their application. It is a curious fact that the influence of the national government has been largely instrumental in preserving the old system of indigo dyeing. Thanks to the Quartermaster-General’s Bureau, or the man of science, General Meigs, who presides over it, indigo dyed cloths have been persistently insisted upon for the army. The late war gave a new impulse to indigo dyeing. A skilled dyer, whom we have consulted, was constantly employed in Connecticut, on a tour of professional inspection of a dozen or more different establishments making army goods. No doctor, he says, ever found in hospital practice more complications of disease than he found in the ailing vats. Among other difficulties there was a deficiency of imported woads, although the cultivation of excellent woad immediately sprung up in Connecticut. In the mean time carrot and rhubarb tops were used as substitutes for the fermenting material of the woad. Carrot-tops grown expressly for that purpose brought as high as twenty-five cents per pound. Since the war the requisitions for indigo dyed woollen goods have not relaxed, and the art is not likely to be lost.