THE FIKE-DAMPS FAMILY CIRCLE. 



PERHAPS the supernatural world of ghosts and hobgoblins 

 never suffered a discomfiture so great as when old Van 

 Helmont began shrewdly to suspect, in the beginning of the 

 seventeenth century, the existence of more kinds of air than 

 one ; and thus threw open the new course of investigation 

 which ended in Priestley's showing us how to catch gases and 

 bottle them up; manipulating them as certainly as if they 

 were so many solids or liquids, and displaying the character- 

 istics of each. 



Thenceforth the nature and powers of thousands of in- 

 visible things became manifest. Chemistry began to assign 

 reasons for many phenomena which had heretofore been com- 

 placently handed over to the disposition of ghosts. It is a 

 fact, though one does not often reflect on the etymology of 

 the thing, that the words 'geist' and 'gas' come from the 

 same Teutonic stock; and this gives us some clue to the 

 notion which Van Helmont entertained of the nature of the 

 elastic and for the most part invisible bodies, to which the 

 word gas is, in our modern vocabulary, applied. 



Unfortunately there happen every year, and many times 

 too often in the course of the year, illustrations of the power 

 of one tribe of combustible gases. 



The records of all mining communities demonstrate the 

 fact that miners are an imaginative or, at all events, a su- 

 perstitious race. No wonder. If people who tread the upper 

 world have been deceived by what seemed to them super- 

 natural appearances, how much more likely- is it that fancy 



