ones, and who had contributed so much to the harmony of the evening. Before parting they could not do less than tender their acknowledgments to Mr. and Mrs. Christie for the excellent manner in which they had discharged their part of the duties-the attendance having been entirely satisfactory and all the materials supplied most excellent, for which they deserved the company's best thanks.

The meeting then broke up, after singing together at the Chairman's suggestion the bard of the Society's Gaelic translation of the National Anthem.

JANUARY 30, 1874.-On this date Mr. John Murdoch read a paper on

OUR FIRES AND FIRE-SIDES.

The subject which I have chosen is a practical one, and I hope you will consider it seasonable. Even to those in whom the organs of ideality, wonder, and wit are largely developed, this evening devoted to the grosser matters of our Fires and Fire-sides will not, I hope, be a great sacrifice.

I have chosen this subject at the present time, thinking that the exhorbitant price of fuel might induce people to give an amount of attention to the economics of our fires and fire-places which they might decline to do when coals were only at a reasonable price.

No doubt there could be a good deal of poetry and sentiment entwined around the subject. Numbers of beautiful pictures could be conjured up about our ingle-sides, our blazing logs, and our family circles, with their endearing associations and memories; but in one brief hour I can hardly dispose of the mass of matter which I have to lay before you; and in justice to myself, and in mercy to you, I shall not give more time to the subject.

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And," some one asks, "if we are not to have poetry and sentiment around our hearths, what are we to have?"

You shall have a treatise on our Fires, our Fire-places, and our Fuel.

In the first place, I need hardly mention the fact, that no question presses so heavily upon all classes of the community at this moment as that of Fuel does; and if I can do ever so little towards the solution of that question, it is my duty to do so.

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Hitherto, as a rule, we have applied our fuel as if it had been an object with us to get it out of the way; or to burn as much as possible and get the least possible heat from it. For example, the practice of placing the fresh coal on the top of the fire is one of the most flagrant pieces of waste of which we need be guilty. A great deal of the heat of the existing fire is expended in forcing up the chimney the gas which is distilled from the fresh coal. Large volumes of smoke escape up the chimney, or out through the house, when a fresh supply of coal is put on. The smoke which we thus waste is the material out of which, with more scientific contrivances, illuminating gas is manufactured. This smoke escapes, not only to our own direct and immediate loss, but it becomes a nuisance to the whole community; and what should be heating and lighting our houses, falls in smuts and in flakes of soot upon our persons, and upon white dresses which are spread or hung out to dry. That this is good fuel, you have abundance of proof in the fact that soot takes fire so readily when it falls back into the fire-place; and what we want is an apparatus which will burn it before it has gone up the chimney at all. Another proof is often dsplayed to you in the fire-place when you take time to watch it. You see a jet of brown smoke escaping from a piece of fresh coal which has begun to split and crumble with the heat. Set a taper

to this jet, and it becomes a bright and beautiful flame. Now, what is true of these jets of smoke is true of nearly the whole smoke together; and one of the practical questions which have been asked a thousand times is, "How can we best consume our own smoke, and convert it into heat and light?”

There have been a good many contrivances invented for this purpose, but there have been a good many-no doubt very stupid -excuses for not departing from the old wasteful way. The principle of all of them may be said to be one. You have a good example in the paraffin lamp of the present day. Without the brass dome and the glass, one-half the gas of the oil would escape in smoke, and rest in soot upon your ceilings and walls. But with the dome, the heat of the existing flame is kept in so as to set fire to part of that smoke; and when the glass is added, much even of what escapes the dome is kindled, and light comes out of darkness. The same thing is done in those furnaces in which the smoke of the fresh coal is made to pass closely over the red embers; or still better, where this gas is made to pass up, or down, or across, as the case may be, right through the strong, red fire. This is the secret of the whole affair-of consuming your own smoke, and taking both heat and light out of darkness.

The thing has been accomplished in thousands of instances, by

simply placing the red fire on the top of the fresh coal. Then, as the gas or smoke escapes from the newly-heated coal, it passes into the overlying fire, is kindled, and becomes fire instead of smoke.

But the waste of fuel in these and in other respects is almost insignificant, as compared with the waste of fire after we have kindled it. The practice of putting our fire places, three sides in the wall, and only one side towards us, is surely very absurd in a country where heat is an object. At a rough estimate, we do not get more than one-fourth of the heat which is thus generated. You have, in fact, fire enough in one stupidly arranged grate or stove to give as much heat to each of three apartments as it at present gives to one, not to speak of the further heating which might be effected with what escapes by the vent.

Every one who has seen the American stoves and ranges in use knows the very small amount of fuel which can be made to do the work of a very large fire in our ordinary ranges. And I have seen a Belgian apparatus which heated five different pans with a fire which you could put into a gallon measure. In Sweden they have carried

their economical invention so far as to make one small fire cook half-a-dozen different dishes in such rapid succession as to be done simultaneously. They have a case covered with wadding, so as that it will allow scarcely any of the heat which it receives to escape. There is a cooking pan, or pot, or kettle, which fits exactly into this case. It is charged, say, with so many pounds of mutton to be boiled. It is placed in an opening in the stove, until it has begun to boil. The Swede lifts the heated vessel, and places it in the non-conducting wadding. The potatoes, the pie, the pudding, are in succession brought to the boil in the same manner, and placed in their respective non-conducting cases; and thus you see another way in which one small fire can be made to do three, four, or five times the cooking which we, in our extravagance, would think of making it do!

Instead of letting the heat away into dead walls, we should let it into one or two other rooms, and instead of letting so much heat out at the top of the chimney, make it heat one or two apartments in different storeys. This has actually been done by a clergyman near Dumfries. Then, there is the heating of a whole house by means of hot air pipes, by means of hot water, or by means of steam. The kitchen fire, with any of these, would render any other fire entirely unnecessary in a large house; and what people would in former years have scouted as unn-British, &c., will, in the year 1875, be adopted as eminently practical and necessary, and we will wonder at our own slavish conformity to a wasteful custom.

No doubt it is pleasant to see the flame of our fires, and to watch the faces, of which we have heard so much; but these, I fancy, must give way to the inevitable, as our pleasant sailing craft gave way to the grinding and champing of the steamboat; as the pleasant stage coach made way for the iron horse and his train of unpoetical vans; and as the old system of signals from hill-top to hill-top has been banished by the telegraph.

For my own part, I look forward to the time when these hot air and hot water appliances shall have made our houses ten times more pleasant than they ever were with grates.

Let us have those appliances once in general use, and you will have every new house fitted up with means of delectable cleanliness which will give to every family at home some of the luxuries which cannot at present be enjoyed excepting at the cost of a visit to an establishment like Cluny Hill.

But I must pass from this mere economy in the use of fuel to the subject of how and where we are to get fuel with which to supply the more economical fire-places of the no distant future.

For my part, I do not see any good reason why we, away in the North, or why others away to the West, have waited so long to be taught the use of our peat bogs. I am afraid this waiting was only a matter of silly fashion and prejudice, begotten of a false deference to the denizens of the coal-producing regions of Great Britain. This is no mere flight of fancy; nor is it a random shaft let fly at another people. It is a well-grounded conviction of mine that in too many things-I do not say in all-we in the Highlands neglect advantages which nature has given us, for no better reason than that the example of utilizing them has not been set in the Lowlands. England and the South of Scotland have their coal beds far down in the bowels of the earth; we have ours spread out on the face of the earth. Thus, coal has had to be brought up at terrible sacrifices, physical, social, and moral; in so much, that whole populations have been, to a notorious degree and extent, demoralized, or, as some would say, brutalized—at any rate, degraded-far below the general level of our working classes. we have stood by lamenting the absence of the coal beds which cost so much, whilst our own coal beds might have been turned to account, in the light of day, and in the balmy breath of heaven. The right way of following the example of England would have been to go to work at the peat which God gave us, as she did at her own coal.

Yet,

True, we have been cutting peats. But peats are not genteel. They are only fuel for poor, vulgar mountaineers! We adopted the fire-places, too, of the coal countries, and thus shut ourselves

out from the use of peats. Our peat-burning neighbours and progenitors had their fires in the middle of the floor, with none of the heat escaping into dead walls, and not much of it even escaping by the "lum." They had the full benefit of all they burned.

To this night I have a lively impression, and a grateful recollection of a warning I got at a peat fire in a village inn in the southwest of Ireland nine years ago. I had travelled twenty-five Irish miles on a Bianconi, out-side car, in pelting rain, all the way from Killarney to Kenmere. Finishing my business at the latter place, I set out on a forty-two miles' journey in the evening of the same day, on another outside car, drawn by a blind horse, as it proved, and driven by a dozing coachman. About ten o'clock we came to a stage at the village of Sneem. I need not tell you that we were cold, and stiff, and hungry. I was shown into a tidy little stalllike room, to await the tea, the toast, the bacon, and the eggs. did not stay long in my stall. I made a hurried survey, and shortly found the kitchen, bright and warm, and comfortable, and homely, where I readily received a hearty welcome from the inmates, who sat around the peat fire in the middle of the floor. I feel as

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if some of that warmth were still about me, and the picture of that pleasant, homely group still hanging up among my mind's furnishings and adornments. In and around that fire you can get poetry and philosophy as well as domestic economy, if you choose to hover about it. For me, I must leave it, and turn to our own peats and peat bogs.

There are fourteen years, or more, since I endeavoured to impress the public with the value of our peat mosses; and when the country began in the beginning of last autumn, to feel the pressure of the coal famine, and when there was reason to think that there would be some weather to dry peats, I wrote to one of our local papers on the subject, urging that steps should be taken immediately to cut peats, and have them ready for the winter. Since then, numbers of others have taken the subject up.

It is far within the mark to say that in the Highlands we have 1,000,000 acres of peat bog, the depth of three feet. In Ireland there are over four and a quarter million acıes, estimated at an average depth of eleven feet.

Our own million acres will give nearly five billions of solid yards; and if you assume that five yards will yield a ton of dried peat, compressed peat, or dense peat, as the case may be, we have one billion of tons of excellent fuel in Scotland, and somewhere about twelve billions in Ireland.

Now, as to the use of peat, that, as we have seen, is no innovation. There may, of course, be room for great improvements in