strenuous precautions at this season. Gas pipes and fittings should then be tested; furnace flues and settings looked to; stove, heater, and grate fixtures and connections examined—and in all these particulars the scrutiny should be most closely directed to parts ordinarily covered up or out of sight, so that any defect or weakness from long disuse may be exposed. When to the above causes of fires we have added the extremely fruitful one found in the extensive use of coal oil within a few years past, we have indicated the most common sources of conflagrations of known origin. An English authority gives the percentages of different causes of 30,000 fires in London, from 1833 to 1865, as follows: Candles, 11.07; curtains, 9.71; flues, 7.80; gas, 7.65; sparks, 4.47; stoves, 1.67; children playing, 1.59; matches, 1.41; smoking tobacco, 1.40, other known causes, 19.40; unknown causes, 32.88. The foregoing figures do not give the percentage of incendiary fires,> and later statistics would, no doubt, show vastly more fires from the use of kerosene than are here attributed to candles.

The prevention of fires, and the best means of minimizing the loss when they do occur, are topics which cover a wide field, and a collection of the literature on the subject would make a very respectable library. As the question presents itself to-day, it may well be doubted whether the general practice of large property holders of insuring all their possessions does not tend to lessen the constant vigilance which is the most essential requisite in preventing fires. Thousands of merchants never mean to keep a dollar's worth of goods in store or warehouse that is not fully covered by insurance, and they make this cost a regular charge upon their business as peremptorily as they do the wages paid the hands in their employ. But few manufacturers can so completely cover their risks by insurance, yet a large portion of them do so as far as they are able. It does not follow but that the larger portion of both merchants and manufacturers exercise what the law will fully decide is "due vigilance" in the care of the property so insured, but it is evident that in most cases the thoughtfulness is much less complete—the care wonderfully lacking in personal supervision—as compared with what would be the case were each one his own insurer. Of course, this in no way casts a doubt upon the general policy of business men being amply insured, but in fact shows the greater necessity why they should be so, that they may not suffer from the carelessness of a neighbor; it also points to the necessity of continually increasing care and thoroughness of inspection on the part of the insurance companies. These agencies, in fact, must compel the insured to keep up to the mark in the introduction of every improvement to ward off fires or diminish their destructiveness. The progress made in this department during recent years has been great. The almost universal use of steam has been attended by the fitting up of factories with force pumps, hose, and all the appliances of a modern fire brigade; dangerous rooms are metal sheathed, and machinery likely to cause fire is surrounded by stationary pipes from which jets of water may be turned on instantaneously from the outside; stores and warehouses have standing pipes from which every floor may be flooded with water under pressure, and the elevators, those most dangerous flues for rapidly spreading a fire, are either bricked in entirely or supposed to be closed at every floor. The latter point, however, is sometimes forgotten, as sea captains forget to keep the divisions of their vessels having watertight compartments separate from one another; the open elevator enlarges a small fire as rapidly as the open compartment allows the vessel to sink.

With the best of appliances, however, discipline and drill on the part of the hands, in all factories, is of prime importance. It is always in the first stages of a fire that thoroughly efficient action is necessary, and here it is worth a thousand-fold more than can be any efforts after a fire is once thoroughly started. Long immunity is apt to beget a feeling of security, and the carelessness resulting from overconfidence has been the means of destroying many valuable factories which were amply provided with every facility for their own preservation. The teachers in some of the public schools of New York and Brooklyn, during the past year, set an example which some of our millowners might profitably follow. There have been cases when, from a sudden alarm of fire, children have been crushed in their crowding to get out of the building. The teachers, in the instances referred to, marched their children out, under discipline, as if there had been a fire. Let owners of factories try some such plan as this, by which workmen may be called upon to> cope with an imaginary fire, and many of them will, we venture to say, find means of improving their present system or appliances for protection, elaborate as they may at present think them to be.

WHAT IS LIGHT?

If on opening a text book on geology one should find stated the view concerning the creation and age of the earth that was held a hundred years ago, and this view gravely put forward as a possible or alternative hypothesis with the current one deducible from the nebula theory, one would be excused for smiling while he turned to the title page to see who in the name of geology should write such stuff. Nevertheless this is precisely similar to what one will find in most treatises on physics for schools and colleges if he turns to the subject of light. For instance, I quote from a book edited by an eminent man of science in England, the book bearing the date 1873.

"There are two theories of light; one the emissive theory; ... the other, the vibratory theory;" just as if the emissive or corpuscular theory was not mathematically untenable sixty years ago, and experimentally demonstrated to be false more than forty years ago. Unless one were treating of the history of the science of optics there is no reason why the latter theory should be mentioned any more than the old theory of the formation of the earth. It is not to be presumed that any one whose opinion is worth the asking still thinks it possible that the old view may be the true one because the evidence is demonstrable against it, yet while the undulatory theory prevails there are not a few persons well instructed otherwise who still write and speak as though light has some sort of independent existence as distinguished from so-called radiant heat; in other words, that the heat and light we receive from the sun are specifically different.

A brief survey of our present knowledge of this form of energy will help to show how far wrong the common conception of light is. For fifteen years it has been common to hear heat spoken of as a mode of molecular motion, and sometimes it has been characterized as vibratory, and most persons have received the impression that the vibratory motion was an actual change of position of the molecular in space instead of a change of form. Make a ring of wire five or six inches in diameter, and, holding it between the thumb and finger at the twisted ends, pluck it with a finger of the other hand; the ring will vibrate, have three nodes, and will give a good idea of the character of the vibration that constitutes what we call heat. This vibratory motion may have a greater or less amplitude, and the energy of the vibration will be as the square of that amplitude. But the vibrating molecule gives up its energy of vibration to the surrounding ether; that is to say, it loses amplitude precisely as a vibrating tuning fork will lose it. The ether transmits the energy it has received in every direction with the velocity of 186,000 miles per second, whether the amplitude be great or small, and whether the number of vibrations be many or few. It is quite immaterial. The form of this energy which the ether transmits is undulatory; that is to say,