When one remembers that these one hundred and eighty-seven meters are presumably the worst of their kind, having been put in evidence by a naturally suspicious public, it is but fair to assume that the figures overrate rather than underestimate the errors of the average gas meter. Quoting from _The Progressive Age_, a journal devoted largely to the interests of the gas industry: “The meters made to-day will remain a long while in service before they begin to register incorrectly, and when we consider the dampness, extremes of temperature and hard usage they receive as they are transferred from cellar to attic, from among the dust, cobwebs and litter of a basement closet to the corner shelf of some coal cellar, to be the playground of rats, spiders and cockroaches, to be drenched in summer by sweating or leaky water pipes and wear a venerable beard of icicles in winter--to be, in fact, the worst-used machine about a gas plant--we can not fail but express surprise that it registers at all correctly.” THE SUN’S DESTINATION. BY PROFESSOR HAROLD JACOBY, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY. Three generations of men have come and gone since the Marquis de Laplace stood before the Academy of France and gave his demonstration of the permanent stability of our solar system. There was one significant fault in Newton’s superbly simple conception of an eternal law governing the world in which we live. The labors of mathematicians following him had shown that the planets must trace out paths in space whose form could be determined in advance with unerring certainty by the aid of Newton’s law of gravitation. But they proved just as conclusively that these planetary orbits, as they are called, could not maintain indefinitely the same shapes or positions. Slow indeed might be the changes they were destined to undergo; slow, but sure, with that sureness belonging to celestial science alone. And so men asked: Has this magnificent solar system been built upon a scale so grand, been put in operation subject to a law sublime in its very simplicity, only to change and change until at length it shall lose every semblance of its former self, and end perhaps in chaos or extinction?