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Rogers Theory about Saponaria officinali

Rogers has a theory about how the impurity layer got onto the cloth. But to a scientist the right word is hypothesis. To test his hypothesis, he tried it out in a laboratory and it worked perfectly. He speculated that during weaving the threads on the loom were coated with starch to serve as a lubricant. This would make weaving easier and keep the threads from being abraded or unraveled at the edges. Because the cloth would be stiff from the starch, it was rinsed in a natural soap. Chemist that he was, it was it was by its binomial nomenclature, Saponaria officinalis. The rest of us call it soapwort, a wonderful natural soap still used to wash delicate linen fabric. 

After rinsing, the cloth was laid out in the sun to dry. As the cloth dried, water in the threads wicked their way to the surface carrying with them any remaining starch that remained and many different saccharides found in the soap. As the water evaporated into the atmosphere it left behind countless molecules of various sugars and starch as concentrations on the outermost fibers. Both sides of the cloth would have such a coating, but the side facing the sun would have the thicker concentration.