One firm specializing in this industry accumulated soiled bags to the extent of approximately 2,000 per month. It had never contemplated the feasibility of subjecting them to any treatment, probably because new bags were relatively cheap. But, as a result of the national demand for linen for more vital purposes, and the exceeding scarcity of the basic raw material, which had the effect of sending the price of flax from £54 to £280--$270 to $1,400--per ton, the idea of recovering the bags assumed more pressing significance. A sample was taken and submitted to a degreasing process. It was discovered that the combined action of steam and centrifugal action speedily separated the clogging gummy constituents from the fibres of the linen. When examined after treatment the bags were found to be quite free from every trace of the nicotine, and it would have been difficult for the uninitiated ever to have identified them with the industry of nicotine extraction. The tobacco juice was recovered in appreciable bulk, but what was far more important was the reclamation of the bags. In the cleansed condition they were worth from £20 to £40--$100 to $200--per ton. To enumerate all the industries from which odds and ends of cotton-waste are derivable would demand too much space. There are stalks and ends of plumes from the fabrication of artificial feathers, tangled bundles of loose tatters, fragments of silk in a thousand and one forms, mercerized and natural, and so on. The yield from a single factory or workroom may be trifling, perhaps, while there is the rag-merchant to hand to take delivery of this residue. A firm may readily concede the preservation of its waste until it assumes a formidable bulk to be more troublesome than it is worth, as well as littering the factory or occupying space which can be put to more valuable account. So it generally throws the residue into the furnace, but the utilization of such waste as fuel represents the most costly method of disposal which could be practised.