The “ether” of to-day, with its imaginary penetration and its material action without material properties, has merely taken the place of the equally imaginary phlogiston, caloric, electric, and magnetic fluids, the “imponderables” of the past. I have little doubt that ere long the modern modification of these physical superstitions will share their fate, and we shall all adopt the simple conception that heat, light, end electricity are, like sound, merely transmissible states or affections of matter itself regarded bodily, as it is seen and felt to exist. This may possibly throw a good many mathematicians out of work—or into more useful work; but, however that may be, it will certainly aid the general diffusion of science as the intellectual inheritance of every human being. At present the explanations of the simple phenomena of light and heat are incomparably more difficult to understand and to account for than the facts which they attempt to elucidate. A NEGLECTED DISINFECTANT. When the household of our grandmothers was threatened with infection, the common practice was to sprinkle brimstone on a hot shovel or on hot coals on a shovel, and carry the burning result through the house. But now this simple method of disinfecting has gone out of fashion without any good and sufficient reason. The principal reason is neither good nor sufficient, viz., that nobody can patent it and sell it in shilling and half-crown bottles. On September 18th last, M. d’Abbadie read a paper at the Academy of Sciences on “Marsh Fevers,” and stated that in the dangerous regions of African river mouths immunity from such-fevers is often secured by sulphur fumigations on the naked body. Also that the Sicilian workers in low ground sulphur mines suffer much less than the rest of the surrounding population from intermittent fevers. M. Fouqué has shown that Zephyria (on the volcanic island of Milo or Melos, the most westerly of the Cyclades), which had a population of 40,000 when it was the centre of sulphur-mining operations, became nearly depopulated by marsh fever when the sulphur-mining was moved farther east, and the emanations prevented by a mountain from reaching the town. Other similar cases were stated. It is well understood by chemists that bleaching agents are usually good disinfectants; that which can so disturb an organic compound as to destroy its color, is capable of either arresting or completing the decompositions that produce vile odors and nourish the organic germs or ferments which usual accompany, or, as some affirm, cause them. Sulphurous acid is, next to hypochlorous acid, one of the most effective bleaching agents within easy reach.