104 ILLINOIS STATE ACADEMY OF SCIENCE 



numerous other familiar substances. The compound, car- 

 bon dioxide, possesses little or no such life, and is well 

 known to be as certain as water to drown out the life of 

 an animal or fire that is completely immersed in it. 



The pui-pose for which an ordinary fire is built is to 

 produce a more desirable thing than carbon dioxide, 

 namely, heat, which is described by one of the most emi- 

 nent scientists of history as a ''mode of motion". Can a 

 person of ''horse sense", without more evidence than the 

 mere reputation, for science, of the writer who tells us of 

 energy "stored-up" or "sleeping" or "locked up" in 

 coal, believe for a moment that the heat of the fire comes 

 from the carbon, and that the oxygen may be ignored? 

 Can it be believed that such writer is not giving us 

 "twaddle"! 



"SoLiDiPiED Sunshine" is the title of a chapter in a 

 recent and most interesting book from which one of the 

 above quotations was taken. The modest and straight- 

 forward character of the book as a whole will banish any 

 suspicion that this title was chosen because 



"When fiction rises pleasing to the eye Men will be- 

 lieve ' ' 



Sir Ray Lankester says (Second Series, 1912) that 

 "science takes no heed of empty assertions unaccom- 

 panied by evidence which can be weighed and measured." 

 Might he not have added "or common sense" to "sci- 

 ence", or, at least, the common sense that is so fortunate 

 as to be supplemented by sufficient education to enjoy 

 scientific literature? But his remark, as made, implies 

 that if the Master of Science, and Ph. D., who gave us 

 "Solidified Sunshine", had obtained that idealism from a 

 friend, he would have asked the friend, in substance: 

 "How did you find out that sunshine, which includes 

 heat, has taken a solidified, rather than a gaseous form, 

 notwithstanding the familiar fact that the application of 

 heat commonly tends to the production of the more tenu- 

 ous form of matter?" A Master of Science will not be 

 belittled by crediting his reader with enough mentality 

 to recognize such "empty assertions", and to take no 



