90 ' TRANSACTIONS OF THE 



have been productive of good to the arts. Competition is devel- 

 oped in its most profitable forms. Secresy, the bane of mechan- 

 ical improvement, becomes impossible. No great or marked 

 advance in an art can escape recognition, though doubtful cases 

 may be decided erroneously. In the award of distinction the 

 liberal policy is the wise one, and this has generally been followed 

 by all these institutions. 



Franklin Institute. 

 The Franklin Institute has undertaken something for the pro- 

 gress of science, believing that the arts owe to science a debt over 

 and above those which she has derived from them. This is a 

 debtor and creditor account which it would be difficult to adjust, 

 even by the aid of an accountant and a master in chancery. Phys- 

 ical science would not have reached its present position without 

 the facts Avhich the arts furnish to build upon. On the contrary, 

 how many applications flow from one scientific principle ? How 

 complex the action and reaction of fact and principle, of art and 

 science ! The investigations by a committee of the Franklin In- 

 stitute, of water as a moving power, have been pronounced by the 

 highest living authority models of their kind. Those relating to 

 the explosions of steam boilers actually so far exhausted the sub- 

 ject, that no considerable additions have been made to our know- 

 ledge in regard to it for the last twenty years, and public infor- 

 mation is not even now up to the level of the results then deduced. 

 The production within a boiler of hydrogen gas, and its subse- 

 quent mysterious explosion, still finds its way into print, while 

 the dogma that a steady increase of steam pressure cannot pro- 

 duce violent explosions, has yet its advocates. Eut in general, 

 these things are now better understood; and the searing iron has 

 been so effectively applied by this Hercules to many of the heads 

 of the hydra ignorance, that they have not again sprouted. 



The hot and unsaturated steam within a boiler not properly 

 supplied with water, is no longer believed to be the cause why, 

 when w^ater is injected suddenly, the boiler explodes; and on the 

 contrary, the heated metal is .now known to be the source of dan- 

 ger — danger from its own weakness — danger from the strength of 

 steam which it suddenly supplies. 



