something that we hear of even at this late day.

[Illustration]

It was not many years ago that an inventor of a siphon noticed how
water could be drawn up hill with a lamp wick, and the thought struck
him that with a soaking arrangement of this kind in one leg of the
siphon a flow of water could be obtained that would always be kept in
motion. Without taking a second thought he dropped his work in the hay
field, and ran all the way to London, a distance of twenty miles, to
lay his scheme before a learned man of science. He must have felt like
being carried home on a stretcher when he learned that a performance
of this kind was a failure. Among the others who have given an
exhibition of this kind we notice an observer who was more successful.
Being an overseer in a cotton mill, he had only to run over to his
dining room and secure two empty fruit jars and pipe them up, as
shown. He had had trouble in measuring volume by the liquid process by
having everything he attempted to measure get a thorough wetting, and
there were many substances that were to be experimented upon that
would not stand this part of the operation, such as fibers and a
number of pulverized materials. One of the jars was packed in tight,
nearly half full of cotton, and the other left entirely empty. The
question now is to measure the volume of cotton without bringing any
of the fibers in contact with the water. The liquid is poured into the
tunnel in the upright tube under head enough to partially fill the
jars when the overflow that stands on a level with the line, D E, is
open to allow the air in each jar to adjust itself as the straight
portions are wanted to work from. The overflow is then closed and head
enough of water put on to compress the air in the empty jar down into
half its volume. It may take a pipe long enough to reach up into the