WATER AS FUEL. 653 



finements of chemistry, anatomy, and physiology, which stupefy and 

 then pass away like chaff before the wind, but the essential fundamen- 

 tal facts and principle, welded together, and so woven into the stu- 

 dent's mind that he can hold them firmly and wield them effectually ; 

 and that he is conscious of them, not as the goods of other men, or as 

 dogmas which he has because they were imposed upon him, but as his 

 own possession, of which he appreciates the value because he knows 

 how to use them." 



In conclusion, I would express the hope that the expression of opin- 

 ion in the Psychological Section of this Association will strengthen 

 the hands of the Metropolitan branch, which has taken up this question 

 with much earnestness, and, although starting from a different stand- 

 point from my own, has been equally impressed with the evils attend- 

 ing the present system of medical education. 7" am moved by the con- 

 viction that its influence upon the mind is injurious ; they by the fear 

 that it fails to produce the best men, and the belief that it is altogether 

 unreasonable. — Journal of Mental Science. 



WATER AS FUEL. 



By WM. C. CONANT. 



THE satyr in the fable was not more scandalized at the man who 

 blew hot and cold with the same breath, to warm his fingers and 

 to cool his porridge, than the old acquaintances of water as the natural 

 cooler and refresher of the world have been to find it artificially assert- 

 ed as supreme in the opposite oflice of heating. It may well seem the 

 extreme of paradox that the same element which tempers the excess 

 of both solar and animal heat should also become the great source of 

 supply for their deficiency. And yet why should not the universal 

 absorbent of this power be made to restore it ? We have long known 

 that water is but the fuel of the universe as transformed by combus- 

 tion — a cold residual of a cosmic conflagration that still rages in the 

 central mass of our system, and has hardly subsided as yet in its prin- 

 cipal fragments. 



Hydrogen — the " water-parent," or distinctive element of water, as 

 its name imports — may be regarded, metaphorically at least, as a metal, 

 which no degree of cold in nature, or where life exists, can reduce to 

 the density of a liquid. It oxidizes so eagerly, and in such infinite 

 abundance, as to be the only combustible comparatively worth men- 

 tioning : nowhere to be found, in fact, but in vehement combustion or 

 in its cold result as water, unless where locked in the embrace of its 

 secondary afiinity, carbon, in the various oily products of organic life. 

 In the latter condition — the hydrocarbons — hydrogen is protected 



