It is difficult to give the full explanation of the dust free spaces in a few words, but we may say roughly that there is a molecular bombardment from all warm surfaces by means of which small suspended bodies get driven outward and kept away from the surface. It is a sort of differential bombardment of the gas molecules on the two faces of a dust particle somewhat analogous to the action on Mr. Crookes' radiometer vanes. Near cold surfaces the bombardment is very feeble, and if they are cold enough it appears to act toward the body, driving the dust inward--at any rate, there is no outward bombardment sufficient to keep the dust away, and bodies colder than the atmosphere surrounding them soon get dusty. Thus if I hold this piece of glass in a magnesium flame, or in a turpentine or camphor flame, it quickly gets covered with smoke--white in the one case, black in the other. I take two conical flasks with their surfaces blackened with camphor black, and filling one with ice, the other with boiling water, I cork them and put a bell jar over them, under which I burn some magnesium wire; in a quarter of an hour or so we find that the cold one is white and hoary, the hot one has only a few larger specks of dust on it, these being of such size that the bombardment was unable to sustain their weight, and they have settled by gravitation. We thus see that when the air in a room is warmer than the solids in it--as will be the case when stoves, gas-burners, etc., are used--things will get very dusty; whereas when walls and objects are warmer than the air--as will be the case in sunshine, or when open fireplaces are used, things will tend to keep themselves more free from dust. Mr. Aitken points out that soot in a chimney is an illustration of this kind of deposition of dust; and as another illustration it strikes me as just possible that the dirtiness of snow during a thaw may be partly due to the bombardment on to the cold surface of dust out of the warmer air above. Mr. Aitken has indeed suggested a sort of practical dust or smoke filter on this principle, passing air between two surfaces--one hot and one cold--so as to vigorously bombard the particles on to the cold surface and leave the air free.