The merchants of St. Petersburg divide the tallow which they receive from the interior into white and yellow candle-tallow, and common and Siberian soap-tallow ; the latter, which is considered the best tallow for soap-makiug, being brought by several rivers from Siberia to the lake Ladoga, and thence to tho Neva by the canal of Schlusselburg. An ambare, or warehouse, is appropriated to the reception of the tallow on its arrival, in which it is selected and assorted (or brooked) according to quality, after which the casks are marked with the quality, the date of the selection, and the name of the tracker or selector. The white tallow is usually brought in conical casks, 2-6 feet in diameter at the largest and 16 at the smallest end ; but the yellow tallow is commonly in casks of the more usual shape. Yellow candle-tallow, when good, should be clean, dry, hard when broken, and of a fine yellow colour throughout. The white candle tallow, when good, is white, brittle, harcKdry, and clean. The best white tallow is brought from Woroncach. Soap-tallow, however, is said to be better the more greasy and yellow it is. 31`Culloch states that 120 poods of tallow, gross weight (of which the cask is usually about 10 per cent.), make a Petersburg last, and 63 poods an English ton.
Different kinds of tallow melt and retain their fluidity at very different degrees of temperature; the fat which is deposited about the kidneys being, in all animals, harder than that found in the cells of the bones, and especially than the half-oily fat found in the muscles and other soft parts; while the fat of some animals is harder than that of others—that of the sheep and deer, for example, congealing much' sooner than that of the ox or horse. According, therefore, to the
different kinds of fat which may enter into its composition, tallow will be found to vary considerably in fusibility ; but 92° is the halt gene rally given as its melting-point, though Aikin states that he had seen a boiler-full of tallow perfectly fluid at 72°, and even then not sufficiently cooled to be made into candles; nor was this case, he observes, con sidered remarkable, " whence we may conclude that tallow, mado into candles and exposed to the air, loses much of its fusibility." The chief uses of tallow are described minder CANDLE MANUFACTURE and Soar MANUFACTURE.
During a long period of years, foreign tallow paid an import duty of ]s. ed. per cwt., and tallow from the colonies a duty of only Id. These duties were repealed in 1860, munoug other fiscal changes made by Mr. Gladstone.
The importation of tallow has now reached 160,000,000 lbs.annually. The exact figures for 1860, and the countries whence imported, were as follow