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