Mr W. Thomson, F.R.S.E., has devised a new process for determining the calorific power of fuel by direct combustion in oxygen, which promises to supersede, by reason of its greater accuracy, the methods hitherto in use. The process consists in placing a gramme of the coal or fuel to be tested in a platinum crucible covered with an inverted glass vessel. The whole arrangement is placed under water in a suitable receptacle; and the fuel, burnt in oxygen, burns away in a very few minutes, giving off much heated gas, which escapes through the water. The temperature of the water, compared with its temperature before the operation, gives the data upon which the heating power of the coal can be calculated. The question of heat-value in fuel is of course one of first importance to railway Companies and other large consumers of coal. It is, too, in a minor way of importance to householders, who often find, by painful experience, the little heat-value of the fuel which has been shot into their cellars. If coal-merchants were to furnish some guarantee based on a scientific test as above described, they would find it to their own profit, as well as to the advantage of their customers. We do not hear very much in these days of mummy wheat and barley, but many people firmly believe that the seeds of both plants found with Egyptian mummies, and supposed to be three or four thousand years old, will sprout if put in the ground. A few years ago, such wheat was commonly sold as a curiosity; and we believe that many purchasers succeeded in raising a small crop from it. Professor Bentley, who has recently commenced a series of lectures on the Physiology of Plants, asserts most emphatically that no grains which with certainty have been identified as contemporaneous with the deposit of the mummified corpse, have ever come to life. In cases where the so-called mummy wheat has germinated, it has been introduced into the coffin shortly before, or at the time of discovery of the body. Professor Bentley does not name a limit to the time during which seeds retain their vitality, but he says that very few will germinate after being three years old.