“The effect upon bacterial life is also not what one would expect. Though it is destroyed by boiling in water, a temperature of 100° C., it can still endure unaffected a degree of cold much greater in proportion. I have submitted putrefying blood, milk, seeds, etc., for the space of an hour, to a temperature of −182° C., but found that they afterwards went on putrefying or germinating as the case happened to be. This is interesting in one way, as it gives color to Lord Kelvin’s suggestion that the first life might have been brought to this planet by a seed-bearing meteorite, though it does not explain,” he added with a smile, “how the meteorite was originally equipped with seeds. It shows, however, that spores may live upon a planet through long periods of low temperature. In the phenomena of diminishing electrical resistance and its final disappearance, I look for much new light upon the mystery of electricity itself. The changes in the characteristics of metals already observed enlock lessons whose scope we have not yet begun to measure. In fact,” said he, “for a long time to come I shall confine myself to the many fields of research which the temperatures already attained have opened up.” Concerning the zero of absolute temperature, Professor Dewar was disinclined to theorize. As to its being the temperature of inter-stellar space, he has not yet come to any final conclusion, though he expressed the view that the strange white and shining night clouds which have puzzled the astronomers were composed of carbonic acid gas frozen solid. Nor does he yet, despite the temperatures reached, see how the zero is to be attained. He, like the Arctic explorers of the past, has reached a point beyond which no appliances of modern science can carry him. The mysteries which cluster about this point are so many, however, that the efforts to reach it will be untiring from this time forth. That its discovery will be a key to many unsolved problems in electricity, in matter, in light, and the great inscrutable mystery of life itself, is not to be doubted. This is an age of constant change in scientific conceptions and traditions, every marked advance in any one science tending to cause more or less of a readjustment of existing views in every other. Science has long been editing the Book of Genesis with an unsparing pen, and with the attainment of the zero of absolute temperature the command “Let there be light” may take on a meaning which the profoundest philosopher or scientist of the present time cannot remotely conceive. THE HOUSE WITH THE TALL PORCH. BY GILBERT PARKER.