abstract:Ox gall is gall, usually obtained from cows, that is mixed with alcohol and used as the wetting agent in paper marbling, engraving, lithography, and watercolor painting. It is a greenish-brown liquid mixture containing cholesterol, lecithin, taurocholic acid, and glycocholic acid.
By the 17th century, the walls of the court were painted with a noisome cocktail of ox-blood, ox-gall, lamp black and a bucket of urine: soon afterwards, tennis became unfashionable and all but disappeared to be revived as a modified, open-air sport, in the wake of the invention of the lawn-mower, by Major Wingfield in the 1870s.