Excerpt from A New and Complete Treatise on the Arts of Tanning, Currying, and Leather-Dressing: Comprising All the Discoveries and Improvements Made in France, Great Britain, and the United States The art of tanning has for a long time consisted of a series of empirical operations, notwithstanding the fact that there is no art which is so dependent upon certain fixed principles, and on which chemistry exerts so great an influence. The processes followed in manufactories, in the past, have varied according to their localities; and have been transmitted from father to son, as heir looms which they have had great scruples in abandon ing or even touching. All new innovations were viewed with scorn, and rejected, even without experiment. When a workman had succeeded in producing good work, he believed he had attained the 926 plus ultra of his art, and he' would have believed he was unworthy of this title, if he could have been persuaded that he had yet many things to learn. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.