With the best of appliances, however, discipline and drill on the part of the hands, in all factories, is of prime importance. It is always in the first stages of a fire that thoroughly efficient action is necessary, and here it is worth a thousand-fold more than can be any efforts after a fire is once thoroughly started. Long immunity is apt to beget a feeling of security, and the carelessness resulting from overconfidence has been the means of destroying many valuable factories which were amply provided with every facility for their own preservation. The teachers in some of the public schools of New York and Brooklyn, during the past year, set an example which some of our millowners might profitably follow. There have been cases when, from a sudden alarm of fire, children have been crushed in their crowding to get out of the building. The teachers, in the instances referred to, marched their children out, under discipline, as if there had been a fire. Let owners of factories try some such plan as this, by which workmen may be called upon to cope with an imaginary fire, and many of them will, we venture to say, find means of improving their present system or appliances for protection, elaborate as they may at present think them to be. * * * * * WHAT IS LIGHT? If on opening a text book on geology one should find stated the view concerning the creation and age of the earth that was held a hundred years ago, and this view gravely put forward as a possible or alternative hypothesis with the current one deducible from the nebula theory, one would be excused for smiling while he turned to the title page to see who in the name of geology should write such stuff. Nevertheless this is precisely similar to what one will find in most treatises on physics for schools and colleges if he turns to the subject of light. For instance, I quote from a book edited by an eminent man of science in England, the book bearing the date 1873. "There are two theories of light; one the _emissive_ theory; ... the other, the _vibratory_ theory;" just as if the emissive or corpuscular theory was not mathematically untenable sixty years ago, and experimentally demonstrated to be false more than forty years ago. Unless one were treating of the history of the science of optics there is no reason why the latter theory should be mentioned any more than the old theory of the formation of the earth. It is not to be presumed that any one whose opinion is worth the asking still thinks it possible that the old view may be the true one because the evidence is demonstrable against it, yet while the undulatory theory prevails there are not a few persons well instructed otherwise who still write and speak as though light has some sort of independent existence as distinguished from so-called radiant heat; in other words, that the heat and light we receive from the sun are specifically different.