To make walking sticks from rhinoceros strips, they must first be straightened by damping and suspending from a nail with a weight at the lower end. When thoroughly dry they should be trimmed by knife, rasp, file, emery, etc., and made as smooth as possible. Now French polish them without any " stopping," thus allowing the polish to penetrate. When a good surface has been obtained and a ferrule put on, the work is complete. This produces a semi-transparent appearance, tinted by the polish, and broken abruptly by large dark, or even black, patches. The usual preservatives replace the semi-transparent appearance by a whitish opaque appearance, similar to wood. The elasticity will also suffer in the latter case.