When quite dried, the cakes of now full-coloured pigment are carefully powdered, and sifted by means of square muslin-bottomed sieves, contained in a covered box some 2 feet high by 2½ wide, in which the sieves, which slide on a framework inside the box, are jerked backwards and forwards by means of a handle on the outside of the box or case containing them. The now fully-prepared vermilion is removed to the packing house, where may be seen rows of workmen, men and boys, seated before a series of tables. Between every two workmen is a third, with a small pair of scales, which he holds in his left hand; and as the workmen on either side place before him the little pieces of paper in which the vermilion is to be wrapped up, he weighs into each paper one tael (about an ounce and a third avoirdupois) weight of vermilion; the papers are two in number, the inner a black or prepared paper, and the outer a piece of ordinary white paper. After being wrapped up, the packets are placed in rows before another workman, who stamps them with a seal containing in Chinese characters the name and address of the manufactory in which the article has been made, and the quantity and quality of vermilion contained in the packet. The rapidity and deftness of the Chinese workmen at this employment is really surprising; the stamping, for instance, is effected at the average rate of sixty impressions per minute, and the wrapping up is carried on with proportionate rapidity. The mixture of alum, which is the ordinary aluminium potassium sulphate, with the vermilion, in one of its stages of manufacture as described above, is not added, as at first sight we thought it might be, merely to assist in clarifying or purifying the water by causing it to deposit its sediment, but seems to have some peculiar effect upon the colour, although what may be the _rationale_ of the process, or how it acts, we cannot quite clearly see. The glue is added as described above merely to favour separation of the finely elutriated vermilion by holding it longer in suspension than the coarser particles, which sink first, and may therefore be separated in their order of stratification.