Mr. Phillips had been led many years ago, as he now informed us, to consider the nature of fire and water. It so chanced that he had witnessed most of the great conflagrations which have happened in London during the last twenty or thirty years. The destruction to the Royal Exchange, the Houses of Parliament—the fire at the Tower, theatres, great warehouses—he was present at them all; and he could not but observe amidst the prodigious efforts made to save them, that water was comparatively powerless upon violent flames; and therefore inadequate to the task it was called upon to perform. He was also witness of a series of terrible volcanic eruptions. He was in a seventy-four gun-ship in the Mediterranean at the time. For thirty or forty days there was an eruption, and sometimes two or three, almost daily. The most terrific of these—and by which they were nearly lost, having been driven towards it, and only saved by a sudden change of wind—was of such force, that the shock was felt throughout the south of Europe,—from the Rock of Gibraltar, to Stromboli. A volcanic island was thrown up in the middle of the sea, from a depth of four or five hundred feet. This island was of molten lava, and rose in the form of a crescent with an open crater, into which the sea continually rushed like a cataract. But the fire within was not extinguished. At each successive eruption, the water was ejected with a force that sent it up two miles, and sometimes three miles high—again to descend in thousands of tons upon the crater, but without extinguishing the fire. The sea was boiling for a quarter of a mile on one side of the island: the fire was completely beyond its power. Instead of extinguishing fire, the water was made to boil. But he observed this further phenomenon. A dense cloud of vapour was sometimes generated; and whenever the wind bore this vapour into the flames, they were immediately extinguished. A consideration of these phenomena led Mr. Phillips to the following conclusions. Fire and water are not natural enemies, but very near relations. They are each composed of the same elements; and in the same proportions; the component parts of water can be turned into fire; and when fire ceases to be fire, it becomes water. (This latter proposition caused Mr. Diggs to prick up his ears, but he said nothing.) The two elements had by no means the direct and immediate power over each other that was generally supposed. Water was a compact body, and acting in this body, it could not act simultaneously on the particles of gases which produce flame; but a gaseous vapour being of an equally subtle nature with the gases it has to attack, can instantly intermix with them. Find, therefore, a gaseous vapour, which shall intercept the contact of the gases of flame, and thus prevent their chemical union, their inflammatory forces are thereby destroyed, and the flame is at once extinguished.