give. Here are some of these
lightning papers, as they are called; they are very pretty and very
harmless; and these, too, give brilliant red flashes as I throw them.
The red tint has, no doubt, been produced by strontium also. You see
we recognized the substance simply by the color of the light it
produced when burning.

Perhaps some of you have tried to make a ghost at Christmas by
dressing up in a sheet, and bearing in your hand a ladle blazing with
a mixture of common salt and spirits of wine, the effect produced
being a most ghastly one. Some mammas will hardly thank me for this
suggestion, unless I add that the ghost must walk about cautiously,
for otherwise the blazing spirit would be very apt to produce
conflagrations of a kind more extensive than those intended. However,
by the kindness of Professor Dewar, I am enabled to show the
phenomenon on a splendid scale, and also free from all danger. I
kindle a vivid flame of an intensely yellow color, which I think the
ladies will unanimously agree is not at all becoming to their
complexions, while the pretty dresses have lost their variety of
colors. Here is a nice bouquet, and yet you can hardly distinguish the
green of the leaves from the brilliant colors of the flowers, except
by trifling differences of shade. Expose to this light a number of
pieces of variously colored ribbon, pink and red and green and blue,
and their beauty is gone; and yet we are told that this yellow is a
perfectly pure color; in fact, the purest color that can be produced.
I think we have to be thankful that the light which our good sun sends
us does not possess purity of that description. There is one substance
which will produce that yellow light; it is a curious metal called
sodium--a metal so soft that you can cut it with a knife, and so light
that it will float on water; while, still more strange, it actually
takes fire the moment it is dropped on the water. It is only in a
chemical laboratory that you will be likely to meet with the actual
metallic sodium, yet in other forms the substance is one of the most
abundant in nature. Indeed, common salt is nothing but sodium closely
united with a most poisonous gas, a few respirations of which would
kill you. But this strange metal and this noxious gas, when united,
become simply the salt for our eggs at breakfast. This pure yellow
light, wherever it is seen, either in the flame of spirits of wine
mixed with salt or in that great blaze at w