All the world has heard of Professor James Dewar, and of his late great triumphs in the liquefaction of oxygen gas and the solidification of nitrogen and air. The sensation caused by his extraordinary results won him at once the congratulations of many scientific men, the profuse encomiums of the press, and the flattering recognition of appreciative royal personages. This was largely due to the fact that in the search for this unknown and mysterious point he had plunged much deeper than any chemist before him into the regions of low temperature, and had arrived within sixty degrees Centigrade of the point itself. This exciting and not uneventful journey downward did not take him beyond the confines of his own laboratory, but his description of it, as well as of the properties of matter under extreme cold, has something of the fascination, to the mind possessed of ordinary chemical curiosity, of the story of a Stanley, a Nansen, or a Peary, describing the peculiarities of countries in which they, of all men, have been the first to set their feet. Professor Dewar, who was born in Kincardine-on-Forth in 1842, was educated at the University of Edinburgh, where his natural and special gifts as a chemist were developed by Sir Lyon Playfair, at that time Professor of Chemistry in the university. The perspicacity and tenacity of purpose which are characteristic of so many Scotchmen were eminently the inheritance of Sir Lyon’s young assistant, and between that period and the present a long series of original investigations in all departments of chemistry have won for Professor Dewar at his prime the Jacksonian Professorship of Natural Experimental Philosophy at Cambridge University, the Fullerian Professorship of Chemistry at the Royal Institution, the Fellowship of the Royal Society, the degree of Doctor of Laws, and other dignities, which make great alphabetical richness after his name upon scientific occasions of state. Personally, he is of middle height and strong build, with a clearly cut face, full of character. His speech, faintly flavored with the accent of Scotia, is exact and emphatic; and his manner, whether he is concentrated upon a scientific demonstration in his laboratory or traversing the speculative questions of the hour in ordinary conversation in his drawing-room, has the earnestness of the profound scientist, very agreeably tempered by the polish of the traveller and cosmopolitan man of the world. His absorption in scientific pursuits has not denied him a very marked esthetic development, and his residential suite of apartments at the Royal Institution is filled with treasures, rare tapestries, bronzes, and carvings, picked up at continental dépôts or purchased at the sales of great collections, which would make a highly interesting article in themselves. To her husband’s scientific sense of the value of age in wines, Mrs. Dewar adds her original researches in the matter of choice teas, and it is averred by the eminent membership