with a
saving of fifty per cent. on the prices now existing in those
districts. While these changes have been going on, and while improved
methods of manufacture have been tending to the cheapening of gas, it
will have been steadily growing in public favor as a fuel; and if in
years to come the generation of electricity should have been so
cheapened as to allow it to successfully compete with gas as an
illuminant, the gas works will still be found as busy as of yore, the
holder of gas shares as contented as to-day; for with a desire for a
purer atmosphere and a white mist instead of a yellow fog, gas will
have largely supplanted coal as a fuel, and gas stoves, properly
ventilated and free from the reproaches I have hurled at them
to-night, will burn a gas far higher in its heating power, far better
in its power of bearing illuminating hydrocarbons, and free from
poisonous constituents.

When the demand for it arises, hydrogen gas can be made as cheaply as
water gas itself, and when time is ripe for a fuel gas for use in the
house, it is hydrogen and not water gas which will form its basis.
With carbureted water gas and 20 per cent. of carbon monoxide we are
still below the limit of danger, but a pure water gas with over 40 per
cent. of the same insidious element of danger will never be tolerated
in our households. Already a patent has been taken by Messrs. Crookes
and Ricarde-Seaver for purifying water gas from carbon monoxide, and
converting it mainly into hydrogen by passing it at a high temperature
through a mixture of lime and soda lime, a process which is chemically
perfect, as the most expensive portion of the material used could be
recovered; but in the present state of the labor market it is not
practical, as for the making of every 100,000 cubic feet of gas,
fifteen tons of material would have to be handled, the cost of labor
alone being sufficient to prevent its being adopted; moreover,
hydrogen can be made far cheaper directly.

From the earliest days of gas making, the manufacture of hydrogen by
the passage of steam over red-hot iron has been over and over again
mooted, and attempted on a large scale, but several factors have
combined to render it futile.

In the first place, for every 478.5 cubic feet of hydrogen made under
perfect theoretical conditions never likely to be obtained in
practice, 56 lb. of iron were converted into the magnetic oxide, and
as there was no ready sale for this article, this a