exhausted; but if we be only devout and diligent new veins will open. Forty years ago, so much oil was required for lighting the streets of cities as well as for private dwellings, that fears began to be entertained lest the great oil-flask of the Northern Ocean might run dry, and the whale family be extirpated. That fear was superseded when, in 1812, gas illumination was introduced. “The best of things is water.” So sang a very ancient Greek; and of all the fragments preserved in Aristotle’s “Rhetoric,” hydropathy and teetotalism have assigned the palm to this old water-poem. Not so our ship-owners. To them the sorest of problems and the saddest of expenses is water. Soup can be inspissated into osmazome, and meat can be squeezed into pemican; but water is not compressible, and it is rather provoking to see the space available for stowage occupied by tanks and barrels of this cheap element. Many expedients have been suggested, and some have partially succeeded. But since we began to write this paper, our attention has been called to a beautiful contrivance which promises to conquer every difficulty. By means of Mr. Grant’s Distilling Galley,[10] the brine may be pumped up from the ocean, and, after cooking the mess of the largest ship’s company, it may be collected in the form of the purest fresh water, to the extent of some hundred gallons each day. Nor is it only a vast saving of room which is effected by this beautiful expedient. It is a saving of time. Frequently ships are compelled to leave the straight route, and sometimes lose a favoring wind, in quest of water. But a ship provided with this apparatus is as independent as if she were sailing over a fresh water lake; and, instead of putting into port, she has only to resort to the never-failing pump. And we may add that it is not only space and time which are saved, but the health of the crew and the passengers. With every precaution cistern-water is apt to spoil, and in the Indian Seas and other regions the water obtained on shore is apt to occasion disease. But the produce of this engine is always as pure as the rain which falls from the clouds. When Pythagoras demonstrated the geometrical proposition, that in a rectangular triangle the sum of the two lateral squares is equal to the square of the hypotenuse, he is said to have offered the sacrifice of a hundred oxen. In modern art we fear that there are many discoveries for which the thank-offering has not yet been rendered.