By one modern invention matches after they are cut are fed into a machine at the rate of one hundred thousand an hour, on to a horizontal table, each match separated from the other by a thin partition. They are thus laid in rows, one row over another, and while being laid, the matches are pushed out a little way beyond the edge of the table, a distance far enough to expose their ends and to permit them to be dipped. When a number of these rows are completed they are clamped together in a bundle and then dipped--first, into a vessel of hot sulphur, and then into one of phosphorus, or other equivalent ingredients may be used or added. After the dipping they are subjected to a drying process and then boxed. Processes differ, but all are performed by machinery. In many factories where phosphorus is used without great care workmen have been greatly affected thereby. The fumes of the phosphorus attack the teeth, especially when decayed, and penetrate to the jaw, causing its gradual destruction, but this has been avoided by proper precautions. The greatly-increased facility of kindling a fire by matches gave an impetus to the invention of _cooking and heating stoves_. Of course stoves, generically speaking, are not a production of the nineteenth century. The Romans had their _laconicum_ or heating stove, which from its name was an invention from Laconia. It probably was made in most cases of brick or marble, but might have been of beaten iron, was cylindrical in shape, with an open cupola at the top, and was heated by the flames of the _hypocaust_ beneath. The _hypocaust_ was a hot-air furnace built in the basement or cellar of the house and from which the heat was conducted by flues to the bath rooms and other apartments. The Chinese ages ago heated their hollow tiled floors by underground furnace fires. We know of the _athanor_ of the alchemists of the middle ages. Knight calls it the “original base-burning furnace.” A furnace of iron or earthenware was provided on one side with an open stack or tower which opened at the bottom into the furnace, and which stack was kept filled with charcoal, or other fuel, which fed itself automatically into the furnace as the fuel on the bed thereof burned away. Watt introduced an arrangement on the same principle in his steam boiler furnace in 1767, and thousands of stoves are now constructed within England and the United States also embodying the same principle. The earthenware and soapstone stoves of continental Europe were used long before the present century.