them into small fragments, then shake them loosely together, and put a pound or two of this mixture on a stone floor and apply a match, the nitre will fizzle briskly, the sulphur will burn fitfully or go out, and the charcoal will last several minutes before it is consumed. If, instead of this crude and imperfect mixture, we take the trouble to grind these ingredients under edge-stones into a fine paste with water, and then dry and granulate it, we have still the precise chemical elements to deal with which we ignited on the stone floor; but they now exist in such close and intimate contact as instantly to act upon each other, and a ton or two of these otherwise slow-burning materials will be converted into gas in the fraction of a second. The inference was simple enough, namely, to grind together the materials required to form glass, and when the heat of the furnace arrives at the point where decomposition takes place, the whole will pass into the fluid state much more quickly, and will yield a much more homogeneous glass than is obtained in the usual manner.” Improves the Drying of Oils. Bessemer one day paid a visit to the works of his friends, Hayward and Company, London, manufacturers of paints and varnishes. He was struck with the wastefulness and imperfection of the time-honored process of drying oils in an iron pot over an open fire; a crude method always attended with danger, and not seldom with a complete loss of the heated oil. As he walked through the works there occurred to him a much better plan which he at once embodied in a sketch. His ideas were put into practice by his friends, to their lasting profit. Instead of a small charge of two or three gallons heated over an open fire, he suggested that fifty or sixty gallons should be run into a tank, in the bottom of which was a pipe terminating in a large rose-head. Connected with this pipe was a coil that could be heated to any desired temperature, and air could be forced through this coil, escaping through the rose-head into the oil. The exact degree of heat required could be thus maintained, and the process completed with certainty and safety, without waste, and, above all, with no discoloration of the oil. This method, carried to a further degree of oxidation, is the foundation of the vast linoleum industry throughout the world. Alfred Nobel and His Explosives.