Long ago an American chemist confirmed what the practical experience of the woodman had already decided. Marcus Bull's table of the heating value of American woods is as follows: Shagbark hickory, 100; white oak, 81; red oak, 68; sugar maple, 60; red maple, 54; white ash, 77; chestnut, 52; white beech, 65; black birch, 63; white birch, 48; pitch pine, 43; white pine, 42. Wood, according to the chemists, is a carbohydrate and the greater the proportion of carbon which it contains the greater is its heat-giving value, the greater the proportion of hydrogen the greater the output of ruddy flames. Yet chemists, who are so sure the alchemists had no ground for their beliefs, do not always agree among themselves. Professor Bull's table of the heat-giving properties of the various woods has been declared inaccurate by other chemists, in spite of the fact that experience in actual use bears it out in many particulars. Again, either the chemists of Europe are at variance with ours or else their trees are, for Gottlieb's table of the heat-giving properties of European trees of similar varieties turns ours upside down. Gottlieb's table of calorics puts oak at the bottom of the list and pine at the top. It is as follows: Oak, 46.20; ash, 47.11; elm, 47.28; beech, 47.74; birch, 47.71; fir, 50-35; pine, 50.85. There is a certain interest in all this, but to him who lights the Yule log on Christmas Eve it probably matters little. He knows that pine will kindle his fire readily and that one of the hard woods will hold it longest. He knows that out of the leaping flames, whether they be composed of phlogiston or incandescent hydrogen, loved fancies flashed into the minds of the elder race, born of the flicker of flame on the imagination of a primitive people, backed by dark forests, night and wind-riding storms. If he have the hardihood let him light his Yule log in the winter twilight of the snowy woods. He will do well to pick a spot where a dense growth of pines shelters him from the wind and a steep ledge makes for him fireplace and chimney at once. Then it does not matter if the snow is deep on the ground and the air filled with flying flakes; his hearth may soon glow with comfort. Even from a materialistic point of view the ancients did well to worship fire. Out of it was to come more or less directly all the material progress of the race toward civilization. *****