APPLICATIONS OF INDIGO IN PRINTING COTTON FABRICS. Before entering upon methods used in large establishments, it may not be without interest to observe the processes still used in Java for printing calicoes, which the natives prefer to any imported from Europe. In Java there are no factories, and the women in each family make and dye or print all the cotton cloths required for their own consumption. They apply by means of a brush or pencil, which they use with great skill, to the cotton tissue which they wish to cover a thin coating of wax mixed with a little resin, the wax being applied to all the parts where the design, which has been first traced upon the cloth, requires that the fabric should remain uncolored. They then immerse the stuff several times in an indigo vat until they have obtained the desired tint. The stuff is afterwards washed and dried for a new application of the wax, carefully applied with a pencil as before. The cloth is then immersed in a bath of a different color, made with madder or catechu, but always of some dye which is perfectly stable; and the operation is repeated according to the number of colors desired. By these successive applications of wax and immersions into different vats, they succeed in producing very complicated and harmonious colors, while no European goods compare with them in stability of dye. In the European, and our own manufacture, the blue bottoms upon vegetable fibres, made by immersion in the indigo vat, are combined with white impressions, or others variously colored, by two distinct methods. Sometimes there is printed upon the cloth before dyeing in the indigo vat a preparation called a reserve or resist, which prevents the indigotine from being deposited in the places where it is applied. Sometimes, on the contrary, the indigo, which has been uniformly fixed upon the fabric, is destroyed in certain places marked out by printing upon them certain chemical agents, called _discharges_.