said that the electric light is the only good thing in this new Palace of Justice. The House of Commons has gradually been fitted up, and the Colonial Parliament Houses in Cape Town and New South Wales are following the examples. Indeed, restaurants, hotels, and public buildings are all testifying to the fact that I am so anxious to bring before you, that electric lighting is a decided success, for they are using it. But we want to see it in our homes. An excellent little book on this point has recently been published by Mr. Hammond, which is well worth your perusal. He has given there a table so striking and convincing that I have had it copied and suspended for your information:

The following table shows the oxygen consumed, the carbonic acid produced, and the air vitiated by the combustion of certain bodies burned so as to give the light of twelve standard sperm candles, each candle burning at the rate of 120 grains per hour:

There you see why the electric light is so pure and so healthy. There is no consumption or pollution of air. There is the smallest possible production of heat. There are none of the existing dangers from fire or suffocation, but all is pure, healthy, and safe.

Our homes on the seas-those ocean palaces that render voyages to America and our colonies a pleasant yachting picnic-are being gradually fitted. Over sixty are already so fitted, and all will soon be done. None but those who have tumbled and tossed on the angry ocean in a pitch-dark confined crib for the seemingly never-ending night, can appreciate the peace and comfort of the soft and gentle little glow-lamp that is now supplied.

Efforts are being made to introduce primary batteries for the generation of electric-light currents, but not as yet with marked success. Unless the products of combustion can be sold profitably, primary batteries must necessarily be costly, and their constant renewal, and the amount of personal supervision they demand, militates much against their use, but some admirable batteries for small and temporary installations have been brought out, notably that of Mr. Holmes. Our railway trains are being lighted. Very satisfactory experiments are being made

on the Brighton, South Western, South Eastern, Metropolitan, Midland, and Great Northern Railways, with dynamos, primary and secondary batteries, and there is no doubt whatever of their ultimate success. There is no reason why the energy of the moving train itself should not produce currents of electricity to illuminate every compartment with the light of day.

Exhibitions have been both banes and antidotes. They have had much to do with the cause of the late mania, but they have also encouraged invention, and stirred up emulation. Last year's Fisheries Exhibition did much to educate Londoners to the advantages of the light. This year's Health Exhibition will do more; and I venture to prophesy-a foolish practice unless you know that this Exhibition will, as an electric light display, be the best we have ever seen.

There have been a good many failures in electric lighting, as there must be in the introduction of every new enterprise, but every failure can be traced to imperfect apparatus, or to the employment of inexperienced contractors-in fact, to bad engineering. It is not long since that the wiring of a large building was let to one firm, and the lighting to another, with the necessary consequence that the whole thing "burst up," to use an Americanism, on the night of opening.

It is difficult to express any opinion on the economy of the electric light. We have not had the experience of any central lighting station of sufficient magnitude to justify the formation of such opinion. Any comparison between gas and electricity on this basis is unfair, because gas is produced in quantities sufficient to supply hundreds of thousands of lamps, while the largest electric light station yet erected does not light up 10,000 lamps. In New York, the price is the same for electricity as for gas, but then gas costs 12s per 1,000 cubic feet, as it did in London, in the memory, perhaps, of some present. Nevertheless, the cost of supplying electricity now is far less than was the cost of supplying gas in the early days of its introduction.

But why draw a comparison? People do not compare the cost of gas with that of candles, nor the price of a pheasant with that of a mutton chop. If we want a luxury we must pay for it, and if the price of the luxury is not too great, people will have it. People will have electric light, if it can be supplied to them, not because it is cheap, but because it is, safe, healthy, pure, soft, and natural. And, moreover, they will not object to pay any reasonable price for it, whatever may be the price of gas. Gas is most destructive, unhealthy, and objectionable when used for artificial illumination. The proper function of gas is the production of heat, and we see in this room how this production of heat can be utilized to form electric currents which diffuse about us a real luxury-pure light. When the electric light can be supplied, questions of sanitation, ventilation, and decoration will determine its use, and not questions of price. At present, for household purposes, it is a luxury for which we must pay; but the progress made is so rapid, and the room for improvement so great, that the day is not far distant when we shall cease to regard it as a luxury, and shall demand it as a necessity. -London Electrical Review.

THE GULF STREAM.

WILLIAM HOSEA BALLOU.

Circulation is not confined to the blood of man nor to the currency of a government or bank. It is the essential factor visible everywhere in nature. The network of the rivers is the life blood of land, the winds of the atmosphere and currents of the ocean. It is death to stand long in the snow because the circulation of the system becomes blocked; thus circulation of some kind is necessary to the preservation of all the elements of nature, social and physical. Man dies when the circulation of the blood ceases. The land would similarly die, so far as habitation or cultivation is concerned, if the rivers should cease their flow. The air would similarly die and no longer afford refreshing breath should the winds cease and the cyclones fail to purify it. The ocean without its currents would soon die and its surface be blocked with dead fishes and lower forms of animal life. This earth will remain habitable just so long as these infinite methods of circulation are perpetuated, and when the force we call gravitation fails to circulate the orbs in space, the doom of the universe will be sealed.

The Gulf Stream is the largest and longest body of flowing water extant. We are to regard it as the steam pipe which conveys the heat from the equatorial furnace of the earth to points where the sun is not sufficiently operative. The amount of heat thus transferred is easily estimated at nearly eighty quintillions of tons annually. The evidences of geology exhibit this stream in a fickle light. It has not been constant in its devotion to Northern Europe and England. When it sought other idols, the cold currents flowing south occupied the greater part of the Atlantic and cooled the now moist westerly winds. Then in Northern France the Arctic fox, reindeer, and glutton prowled about. After this, there was a gradual change and the current returned with greater warmth than is now experienced, so that the fig-tree and canary-laurel flourished where Paris now is. Then it was that lions, tigers and elephants held sway in the valley of the Thames, and London was founded by the denizens of jungles. Some one has been foolish enough to express a fear that an isthmian canal would turn this powerful current into the Pacific Ocean, forgetting that the dimensions of such a canal would hardly average fifty miles in width by one thousand feet depth.

There are numerous theories in regard to the origin of this perpetual-motion current. The most ancient supposed the Mississippi river the parent, but it was found that its volume was one thousand times too small for the purpose, although its waters mingle with it. Captain Livingston ascribed it to a sort of yearly tide, conceived by the sun's apparent yearly motion and influence on the Atlantic. Dr. Franklin held that the stream was the reflux of waters piled up in the Gulf by the trade winds, but these gentle breezes only blow about 111 days per year and could not possibly pile up so much water. Besides, water being eight hundred

times heavier than air, it is scarcely presumed that the trade winds develop strength enough for such a task.

Captain Maury next took into account the action of the sun's heat. He believed that the water at the equator was made lighter by the action of the sun and flowed over the surface toward the poles. The cold water of the Polar seas rushed in to take its place, but being heavier, formed a submarine current.

Sir John Herschel maintained that such effects were impossible, since if the waters became lighter, they could only have an upward, downward or sidewise tendency. The latter could only result from the gradual sloping caused by the bulging of equatorial waters. Such a slope was too slight for such an effect.

Richard A. Proctor, the astronomer, next takes the stand and argues for a theory most generally held to-day. He proceeds to show that the great heat of the sun at the equator has a drying as well as a warming effect on the waters. It evaporates enormous quantities. This causes an intense suction to take place over the whole equatorial Atlantic, and a submarine current of cold waters from the Poles results and takes the place of the waters evaporated, also causing a surface flow of warm waters toward the Poles. He says: "Having once detected the main-spring of the Gulf Stream mechanism, or rather the whole system of oceanic circulation-for the movements detected in the Atlantic have their exact counterpart in the Pacific-we have no difficulty in accounting for all the motions which that mechanism exhibits. We need no longer look upon the Gulf Stream as the rebound of the equatorial current from the shores of North America. Knowing there is an underflow toward the equator, we see there must be a surface flow toward the poles. This must inevitably result in an easterly motion, as the underflow toward the equator results in a westerly motion. We have, indeed, the phenomena of trade and counter-trades exhibited in water currents instead of air currents."

I protest in the name of every student who attended the district school twenty years ago, that this Proctorian theory is almost the exact wording of that of Francis McNally in his "System of Geography," then studied. Yet at that time, the Royal Geographical Society was questioning the very existence of the Gulf Stream. In brief, our unpretentious geographer, who made but a three-page analysis of the physical features of the earth, quietly advanced the only correct. theory of oceanic currents which were only advanced in after years by the great scientists abroad as a result of a regular process of evolution of ideas, given in the last paragraphs. To my own mind, all the causes taken into consideration, which were either accepted or rejected, contribute their quota to oceanic currents. The vast volume of water constantly contributed by the Mississippi and tributaries, must render a portion of the prodigious force and volume of the Gulf Stream possible. The trade winds banking up waters in the Gulf, must add something by the reflux. The bulging of equatorial waters may contribute a little. Of course, the evaporation by the sun is more potent than all other forces. combined, but Richard A. Proctor hrs not an iota of claim to priority for that theory.

The warm waters of

The equatorial current is not continuous as a submarine flow. The United States Coast and Geodetic Survey, has prepared a map, showing an "inner cold wall" from outside New York to Cedar Keys, by which term is meant the equatorial current, flowing from the Arctic Sea. It is not surprising, then, that the warm waters of the Gulf sweep the bed of the ocean for many hundred and perhaps thousands of square miles. It consequently happens that its bed, as well as the Gulf Stream itself, has a distinct fauna and flora of its own, perhaps the most marvelous in any area of the globe. The dredging and trawl nets of the United States Fish Commission, in this area, have brought up literal thousands of new species of fishes and the lowest forms of animal life. There seems to be no end to the species discovered here. Every year a new section of ocean bed is explored, and a new series of animal life brought forth. the Gulf Stream bringing a constant supply of food and soil from the Gulf and the far interior of the west and northwest United States, makes this a rich field for the support of life. Here, too, have been discovered the breeding and hiding places of large schools of new or long-known edible fishes. One acre of land on the ocean bed touched by the Gulf Stream, is worth a hundred acres of the richest prairie land. The products of this area find their way to Chicago, and may be had at the table in a line of eating houses and dining cars as far west as Salt Lake City. Thus the soil which is lost to the West by the depredations of the Mississippi, is returning its par value with interest to the same West by aiding in the support of food fishes far out in the Atlantic.-The Saturday Evening Herald, Chicago.

GEOLOGY.

GEOLOGY IN GENESIS.

PROF. S. H. TROWBRIDGE.

The first chapter of Genesis-not to mention other portions of scripture-is full of geological information; and in its phraseology and general scope is not to be dispensed with in a successful study of the Earth's ancient history. It affords trustworthy data on many points of interest, concerning which, all other sources of information give us nothing but conjecture.

Geologists require a vast amount of time for a physical explanation of all the changes which have taken place in the history of our Earth. And the Bible gives it: For the "beginning" mentioned in the first verse of Genesis, may have been millions of years before the work of the six Mosaic days commenced. But in the beginning, whenever this was, "God created the Heaven and the Earth;" not as they now appear to us, but the matter out of which the Heaven