I can show you in a more striking way that there is this elastic layer or skin on pure clean water. I have a small sieve made of wire gauze sufficiently coarse to allow a common pin to be put through any of the holes. There are moreover about eleven thousand of these holes in the bottom of the sieve. Now, as you know, clean wire is wetted by water, that is, if it is dipped in water it comes out wet; on the other hand, some materials, such as paraffin wax, of which paraffin candles are made, are not wetted or really touched by water, as you may see for yourselves if you will only dip a paraffin candle into water. I have melted a quantity of paraffin in a dish and dipped this gauze into the melted paraffin so as to coat the wire all over with it, but I have shaken it well while hot to knock the paraffin out of the holes. You can now see on the screen that the holes, all except one or two, are open, and that a common pin can be passed through readily enough. This then is the apparatus. Now if water has an elastic skin which it requires force to stretch, it ought not to run through these holes very readily; it ought not to be able to get through at all unless forced, because at each hole the skin would have to be stretched to allow the water to get to the other side. This you understand is only true if the water does not wet or really touch the wire. Now to prevent the water that I am going to pour in from striking the bottom with so much force as to drive it through, I have laid a small piece of paper in the sieve, and am pouring the water on to the paper, which breaks the fall (Fig. 5). I have now poured in about half a tumbler of water, and I might put in more. I take away the paper but not a drop runs through. If I give the sieve a jolt then the water is driven to the other side, and in a moment it has all escaped. Perhaps this will remind you of one of the exploits of our old friend Simple Simon, "Who went for water in a sieve, But soon it all ran through." But you see if you only manage the sieve properly, this is not quite so absurd as people generally suppose. [Illustration: Fig. 5.] If now I shake the water off the sieve, I can, for the same reason, set it to float on water, because its weight is not sufficient to stretch the skin of the water through all the holes. The water, therefore, remains on the other side, and it floats even though, as I have already said, there are eleven thousand holes in the bottom, any one of which is large enough to allow an ordinary pin to pass through. This experiment also illustrates how difficult it is to write real and perfect nonsense. You may remember one of the stories in Lear's book of Nonsense Songs. "They went to sea in a sieve, they did, In a sieve they went to sea: In spite of all their friends could say, On a winter's morn, on a stormy day, In a sieve they went to sea. * * *