Chlorate of potash has always been regarded by manufacturers and chemists as a nonexplosive, and hence there has been little care taken in handling and storing it. A recent explosion, however, at a large chemical works at St. Helens, in England, seems to disprove this view. A storehouse containing about one hundred and fifty tons of chlorate in the form of both powder and crystals took fire, and almost immediately after the falling in of the roof an explosion of terrible violence occurred, the shock being felt over a distance of twenty miles. The chlorate works were entirely demolished. A large gas holder of the city gas works, containing two hundred and fifty thousand cubic feet of gas, was burst and the gas ignited. Eight hundred tons of vitriol was poured into the streets of the town by the wrecking of ten vitriol chambers in a neighboring alkali works. Houses were unroofed, and in the main streets of the town, a quarter of a mile away, nearly every plate-glass window was demolished. A theory accounting for the explosion, advanced by Mr. J. B. C. Kershaw, in the Engineering and Mining Journal, is that it was due to the sudden and practically simultaneous liberation of all the oxygen from such a mass of chlorate, combined with the restraining influence of the kegs (the chlorate was packed in kegs of one hundredweight each), and possibly also helped by the presence of much charred wood and the dense volume of smoke. Whatever is the true theory, however, it is evident that our belief in the nonexplosiveness of potassium chlorate must be modified. NOTES. A piece of experimental glass pavement was laid in Lyons, in the Rue de la République, last fall, and it is reported to have worn very well thus far. The silicate of which the pavement is composed is called by the manufacturers ceramo-crystal or devitrified glass. It may be finished in various colors and with a rough or smooth surface. The blocks are made by heating broken glass to a temperature of 1,250° C. and then compressing it by hydraulic power. The resulting compound is said to have all the qualities of glass except its transparency. The New York Agricultural Experiment Station reports of its analyses of sugar beets in 1898 that the average percentage of sugar in the samples analyzed is 14.2, with a coefficient of purity of 85. In general the yield of beets was between nine tons and twenty tons per acre. An altitude of 12,440 feet, or 366 feet greater than any attained before, was reached in the kite-flying experiments at Blue Hill Observatory, Massachusetts, on February 21st. The flight was begun at twenty minutes to four in the afternoon, with a temperature of 40° and a wind velocity of seventeen miles an hour at the surface. At the highest point reached by the kite the temperature was 12° and the wind velocity fifty miles an hour. Four improved Hargreave kites with curved surfaces, like soaring birds' wings, were used tandem, and the flying line was a steel wire.