referring to, is that which Lord Derby recently brought forward in the House of Lords. He first referred to a Bill before the other House of Parliament for incorporating a company established for the manufacture of paper from _flax straw_. Of course there is little new in this. The rags or materials already employed, are composed, as everybody knows, to a very great extent, of the fibre of flax, and besides, possess this great advantage, that they have been repeatedly prepared for paper making by the numerous alkaline washings which they necessarily receive during their period of use, which, if left to the paper-maker, as would be the case with flax in its raw state, to be done all at once, (and it must _be_ done before the fibre is fit for use,) would add so fearfully to the expense, as to render its adoption for printing or writing paper altogether unadvisable. However, Lord Derby proceeds—“It was proposed to employ the fibres of various plants indigenous to the West Indies, such as the plantain, the aloe, and others, which grow in vast abundance, and which were utterly valueless at the present moment. He need not say, that an immense abundance of this material could be produced; and he wished only to mention, that on one estate in Demerara no less than 160,000 plantain trees were cut down every year, the trees going to waste, as they were cut down only for the purpose of getting at the fruit; and this wasted material contained 250 tons of fibre, capable of being manufactured into paper.” Now, admitting _all_ this, which Lord Derby is _reported_ to have said, I can again assert that there is nothing whatever new in it. I have specimens of paper from the same materials, which were made several years ago. The cost, however, of reducing the plantain into fibre, coupled with the expense of freight, was found, and will still be found, to bring up the price so much, as to effectually exclude it from the manufacture of paper; for this simple reason, that rags, of necessity, must continue accumulating, and before it will answer the purpose of the paper-maker to employ new material—which is not so well adapted for his purpose as the old—he must be enabled to purchase it for considerably less than it would be worth in the manufacture of textile fabrics. All that can be said as to the suitableness of fibre in general may be summed up in very few words; any vegetable fibre having a corrugated edge, which will enable it to cohere in the mass, is fit for the purposes of paper making; the extent to which such might be applied can solely be determined by the question of cost in its production; and hitherto, everything proposed has been excluded, as in the case of the _plantain_ or _banana_, either by the cost of freight, the cost of preparation, or the expenses combined.