In metallurgy, surprising progress has been made. Several new noble metals have been discovered in the Ural Mountains and in Africa, giving scientists and jewellers a variety in color, hardness and weight, as surprising as pleasing. The manufacture of steel direct from the ore has become _un fait accompli_. Iron is used for few purposes, steel being cheaper and better. Aluminum, which is plentifully extracted from common clay, has taken the place of steel and bronze for many uses, in fact for all places where great mass is not practically a requisite. The chemist is even more ingenious and more of a benefactor than his predecessor of the nineteenth century. He has produced from coal oil, in paying quantities, both sugar and vinegar; and has also solved the problem of making sugar from starch. The majority of fabrics are rendered, by chemical processes, proof against fire and mildew; and the law renders the use of such fireproof substances compulsory where wood, cloth or paper is used in building construction. Medical and chemical science has so far advanced that special foods are devised for particular parts of the body. The man who uses his brain employs certain condiments; he who gains his living by the sweat of his brow others, and so on. Foods are concentrated to a degree once deemed absolutely impossible. A vessel can carry in a small chest, which two men can lift, a week’s supply of nourishment for five hundred people. Antiseptics of pleasant taste and non-poisonous character permit the preservation to almost illimitable extent, of heretofore perishable foods. The profusion of new dyes is so great that industrial chemists have, by common consent, restricted the output of shades to enable buyers and manufacturers to keep up with the pace. The shades for each year are announced in advance two to five years ahead. Among these dyes are many which have a sheen truly metallic, thus producing effects never before dreamed of outside of Nature’s laboratory. The butterfly and the peacock are out-rivaled; the gorgeous beauties with which Brazil abounded before her more complete settlement and civilization, cast into the shade. Truly “Solomon, in all his glory, was not arrayed like unto one of these” might the on-looker say on beholding a bevy of young girls, clad in the latest spring fashions. There have been produced numberless new alkaloids having-medicinal effects of character as various as the sources and methods of production of the drugs themselves. The four haloids, iodine, bromine, chlorine and fluorine, have long been discovered to be allotropic forms of one and the same simple element; and the relations between carbon and boron, and carbon and silicon, have been traced to such a degree as to render possible the production of new steels and other alloys, comprising a range of properties undreamed of in 1893.