He begins by pouring some of the oxygen into a test tube, white fumes appearing as he does so from the freezing of the moisture in the surrounding air. Then he drops into the liquid oxygen in the test tube a bit of phosphorus. Despite the flaming energy with which these two combine at ordinary temperatures, there is no action. The phosphorus is as unaffected as a chip of wood in water. He takes it out and pours in some pure alcohol, whose freezing point is much below that of mercury. It freezes with a slight sputter into what you can only call alcohol ice. He takes out the ice and holds a match to it. There is no sign of combustion. Placed on a glass dish the alcohol ice melts into a thick, oily liquid, which also declines to burn. In a few seconds, however, it warms to its ordinary thinness and burns as hungrily as ever. Then comes an exhibition of the “spheroidal state.” A drop of water thrown towards a red-hot stove does not touch the stove, because the evaporation is so rapid that the forming gas lifts the water and keeps it moving about. Precisely the same thing occurs when the oxygen is dropped over a flat glass dish at the temperature of the air, which is red-hot to the oxygen, comparatively speaking. It dances about, shaking and boiling furiously. As he pours it, a tiny drop splashes on the professor’s hand, and he flings it off with a quick jerk. “It makes a sore worse than a burn,” he explains, “if it ever touches the skin.” Then he drops some of it into water. It floats quietly, and as it boils off into gas, freezes a cup of water around it, floating about comfortably in its own boat. Then came curious evidence of its magnetic properties. Pouring a little into a flat cup of rock salt, he placed the cup between the poles of an electro-magnet, the one which Faraday used. The boiling liquid, the moment that the circuit was completed, flew to the two terminals _en masse_ and clung there, still boiling away rapidly on the two points. A piece of cotton wool soaked in the liquid was held closely to one of the points, until all the oxygen had been sucked out of it, when it hung suspended between them. Liquid oxygen has a magnetic property, he said, which is about 1,000 as compared with 1,000,000, the magnetic property of iron. It is a non-conductor of electricity, and a spark one-tenth of a millimetre long from a coil machine, which would give a long spark in the air, would not pass through the liquid. It gave a flash now and then as a bubble of oxygen vapor came between the terminals. Liquid oxygen is, in fact, a high insulator.