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e mere explosion. If this be the case, if it was the smoke and not the sound that brought the rain, then by burning gunpowder and dynamite we are acting much like Charles Lamb's Chinamen who practised the burning of their houses for several centuries before finding out that there was any cheaper way of securing the coveted delicacy of roast pig. But how, it may be asked, shall we deal with the fact that Mr. Dyrenforth's recent explosions of bombs under a clear sky in Texas were followed in a few hours, or a day or two, by rains in a region where rain was almost unknown? I know too little about the fact, if such it be, to do more than ask questions about it suggested by well-known scientific truths. If there is any scientific result which we can accept with confidence, it is that ten seconds after the sound of the last bomb died away, silence resumed her sway. From that moment everything in the air--humidity, temperature, pressure, and motion--was exactly the same as if no bomb had been fired. Now, what went on during the hours that elapsed between the sound of the last bomb and the falling of the first drop of rain? Did the aqueous vapor already in the surrounding air slowly condense into clouds and raindrops in defiance of physical laws? If not, the hours must have been occupied by the passage of a mass of thousands of cubic miles of warm, moist air coming from some other region to which the sound could not have extended. Or was Jupiter Pluvius awakened by the sound after two thousand years of slumber, and did the laws of nature become silent at his command? When we transcend what is scientifically possible, all suppositions are admissible; and we leave the reader to take his choice between these and any others he may choose to invent. One word in justification of the confidence with which I have cited established physical laws. It is very generally supposed that most great advances in applied science are made by rejecting or disproving the results reached by one's predecessors. Nothing could be farther from the truth. As Huxley has truly said, the army of science has never retreated from a position once gained. Men like Ohm and Maxwell have reduced electricity to a mathematical science, and it is by accepting, mastering, and applying the laws of electric currents which they discovered and expounded that the electric light, electric railway, and all other applications of electricity have been developed. It is by ap
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