Abstract
THE British Museum (Natural History) is now open to the public on Saturdays and Sundays from 1 p.m. until 4 p.m. A special exhibition has been arranged in the Shell Gallery to show the animal and plant sources from which some useful commodities come. This is too vast a field for the exhibition to be an exhaustive one, consequently only selected exhibits, illustrating commodities which lend themselves to attractive demonstration, are shown. These include the sources of certain textiles like linen, cotton, silk and rayon; plant and animal dyes used in commerce; the colouring matter and ingredients of cosmetics; the sources of leathers and of bristles for brushes; the plants and animals which produce oil in large enough quantities for it to be valuable to mankind; and some of the uses of moulds and mushrooms. Several of the cases have a war-time interest; for example, animals of use in war, margarine, bacon pigs, pests of stored food. The object of the exhibition is to show the sources of certain commodities, and not to give a detailed explanation with examples of how the raw materials are worked up into the finished products.
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Animals and Plants of Use to Man. Nature 145, 300 (1940). https://doi.org/10.1038/145300b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/145300b0