its own gas and burn it, and make its own coke and burn it, and this can be done approximately at comparatively little cost, and without falling foul of any patent, or causing serious disturbances of existing fireplaces. We must, first of all, do away with the fallacy that fires won’t burn unless air passes through the bottom or front of the fire. The draught under the fire is what people swear by (aye, and many practical and scientific men too), and most difficult it is to sweep this cobweb away from people’s brains. They provide 2 or 3 times as much air as is needed for combustion, ⅓, perhaps, being the necessary supply of oxygen, the remainder serving to make a draught to blow the fire into a white heat, and to carry no end of waste heat rapidly up the chimney; ⅔ of cold air chilling the fire, ⅔ more than needful of cold air coming into the room to chill it; and much of the smoke and combustible gases hurried unburnt up the chimney. The two views which I am anxious to enforce upon the attention of the public, of builders, of ironmongers, and of inventors, are these: that the open grating under the fire is wrong in principle, defective in heating power, and wasteful of fuel, and that the right principle of burning coal is that no current of air should pass through the bottom of the fire, and that the bottom of the fire should be kept hot. This principle is violated by the plan of closing the slits in the grate by an iron plate resting on the grate, which cuts off the draught, but allows the chamber beneath the fire to become cold, and when cinders reach the plate they become chilled, cease to burn, and the fire becomes dead. The right principle is acted upon by the various grates with fire-brick bottoms, and the English public owes much to the inventor of this principle as carried out in the Abbotsford grates, which have done much to educate the British public in the appreciation of the fact that a fire will burn well with a current of air passing over it, and not through it. But there is a better thing than the solid fire-brick bottom, and that is a chamber underneath the grating, shut in from the outer air by a shield resting on the hearth and rising to the level of the bottom bar of the range. This hot-air chamber, into which fine ash can fall, produces on the whole a brighter and cleaner fire, and one which is more readily revived when low, than the solid fire-brick. There is another mighty advantage in the principle of the ‘economiser’--an unspeakable advantage, it is applicable to almost every existing fireplace, and it need not cost more than 3-4._s_ This idea has now been long on its trial. It has been applied in hundreds of houses. It has been submitted to the very severe test of being applied to an infinite variety of grates, under a great variety of circumstances, and tried with coke, anthracite, and coal, good, bad, and indifferent. The effect has been, in an enormous number of instances, a marked success