other European institutions in its relative simplicity of
equipment. One finds, for example, Professor Ramsay and Dr. Travers
generating the hydrogen for their wonderful experiments in an old
beer-cask. Professor Ramsay himself is a tall, rather spare man, just
entering the gray stage of life, with the earnest visage of the scholar,
the keen, piercing eye of the investigator--yet not without a twinkle
that justifies the lineage of the "canny Scot." He is approachable,
affable, genial, full of enthusiasm for his work, yet not taking it with
such undue seriousness as to rob him of human interest--in a word, the
type of a man of science as one would picture him in imagination, and
would hope, with confident expectation, to find him in reality.

I have said that the equipment of the college is somewhat primitive, but
this must not be taken too comprehensively. Such instances as that
of the beer-cask show, to be sure, an adaptation of means to ends on
economical lines; yet, on the other hand, it should not be forgotten
that the beer-cask serves its purpose admirably; and, in a word, it may
be said that Professor Ramsay's laboratory contains everything that
is needed to equip it fully for the special work to which it has been
dedicated for some years past. In general, it looks like any other
laboratory--glass tubes, Bunsen burners, retorts and jars being in
more or less meaningless tangles; but there are two or three bits of
apparatus pretty sure to attract the eye of the casual visitor which
deserve special mention. One of these is a long, wooden, troughlike
box which extends across the room near the ceiling and is accessible by
means of steps and a platform at one end. Through this boxlike tube the
chief expert in spectroscopy (Dr. Bay-ley) spies on the spectrum of
the gas, and learns some of its innermost secrets. But an even more
mystifying apparatus is an elaborate array of long glass tubes, some of
them carried to the height of several feet, interspersed with cups of
mercury and with thermometers of various sizes and shapes. The technical
scientist would not make much of this description, but neither would an
untechnical observer make much of the apparatus; yet to Dr. Travers, its
inventor, it is capable of revealing such extraordinary things as the
temperature of liquid hydrogen--a temperature far below that at which
the contents of even an alcoholic thermometer are solidified; at which,
indeed, the prime constituents o