cements, fish glue - Cements, Fish Glue cements, fish glue -
A correspondent of a technological paper describes a method of preparing glue from fish scales. He says: "The natives of the Maldive and Laccadive Islands, and the Malays of the coasts of Borneo and Sumatra, have a glue which they make as follows: They take the scales of a kind of fish, called by English and American sailors salt-water trout (identical with the salt-water trout of the Gulf of Mexico), and after thoroughly washing them in a glazed earthen jar, which they stopper tightly, and weight so that it will remain under water, they put this jar in a pot of water, and boil it until the scales are reduced to a semi-transparent viscous mass. This requires several hours. Care should be taken that no water or extraneous matter, fluid or solid, be allowed to get into the jar with the scales. The glue thus made is the most tenacious, arid at the same time the most transparent and beautiful that I have ever seen. I have made it in this country from the scales of perch, trout, and bass. I am informed that a similar glue is made from the bladders of various fishes."
The bows of the Laplanders are composed of two pieces of wood, glued together. One of them is of birch, which is flexible, and the other of the fir of the marshes, which is stiff, in order that the bow when bent may riot break, and when unbent it may not bend. When these two pieces are bent, all the points of contact endeavour to disunite themselves, and to prevent this the Laplanders employ the following cement: They take the skins of the largest perches, and having dried them so that the greasy part may be removed by scraping and wiping, and the oil soaked out by any porous material, they soak them in water until they are so soft that they may be freed from the scales, which are thrown away. They then put 4 or 5 of these skins in a reindeer's bladder, or they wrap them up in the soft bark of the birch tree, in such a manner that water cannot touch them, and place them thus covered in a pot of boiling water with a stone above them to keep them at the bottom. When they have boiled about an hour, they take them from the bladder or bark, and they are then found to be soft or viscous, like strong glue. In this state they employ them for gluing together the two pieces of their bows, which they strongly compress together and tie up until the glue is well dried. These pieces never afterward separate.