water "into" the sand, instead of squeezing water "out" of it, as is usually the case when you squeeze part of a wet substance--say a cloth or a sponge. When you lift your foot up, you find that your footmark is covered with water--the water you had drawn to that particular spot by squeezing it. It separates as soon as the pressure is removed. Quartz and quartzite pebbles occur on the South as well as the East Coast. They are sometimes called "fire-stones," because they can be made to produce flashes of flame. If you take a couple of these pebbles, each about as big as the bowl of a dessert-spoon (a couple of flint pebbles will serve, but not so well), and holding one in each hand in a dark room, or at night, scrape one with the other very firmly, you will produce a flash of light of an orange or reddish colour. And at the same time you will notice a very peculiar smell, rather agreeable than otherwise, like that of burning vegetable matter. It would seem that the rubbing together of the stones produces a fine powder of some of the siliceous substance of the stone and at the same time a very high temperature, which sets the powder aflame. I had the idea at one time, based on the curious smell given out by the flashing pebbles, that perhaps it was a thin coating of vegetable or other organic matter derived from the sea-water which burns when the stones are thus rubbed together; but I found on chemically cleaning my pebbles, first with strong acid and then with alkali, that the flame and the smell were produced just as well by these chemically clean stones as by those taken from the beach. The flame produced by the rubbing of the two stones seemed then to be like the sparks obtained by strike-a-lights of flint and steel, or the prehistoric flint and pyrites. Now, however, a new fact demands consideration. The supposition that the powdered silica formed, when one rubs the two pebbles together, is actually "burnt," that is to say, combined with the oxygen of the air by the great heat of the friction, is rendered unlikely by the fact that if you perform the rubbing operation in a basin of water with the stones submerged, the flash is produced as easily as in the air. My attention was drawn to this fact by a letter from the well-known naturalist the Rev. Reginald Gatty. I at once tried the experiment and found the fact to be as my correspondent stated. Not only so, but the smell was produced as well as the flash.