poles has to be added the reciprocal action of the coils around the two rings, the action of which is similar.  From this brief explanation the differences between the Elias machine and the Gramme will be understood.  The Dutch physicist did not contemplate the production of a current; he utilized two distinct sources of electricity to set the inner ring in motion, and did not imagine that it was possible, by suppressing one of the inducing currents and putting the ring in rapid rotation, to obtain a continuous current.  Moreover, if ever this apparent resemblance had been real, the merit of the Gramme invention would not have been affected by it.  It has happened very many times that inventors living in different countries, and strangers to one another, have been inspired with the same idea, and have followed it by similar methods, either simultaneously or at different periods, without the application having led to the same results.  It does not suffice even for the seed to be the same; it must have fallen in good ground, and be cultivated with care; here it scarcely germinates, there it produces a vigorous plant and abundant fruit.—­Engineering.

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BJERKNES’S EXPERIMENTS.

As a general thing, too much trust should not be placed in words.  In the first place, it frequently happens that their sense is not well defined, or that they are not understood exactly in the same way by everybody, and this leads to sad misunderstandings.  But even in case they are precise, and are received everywhere under a single acceptation, there still remains one danger, and that is that of passing from the word to the idea, and of being led to believe that, because there is a word, there is a real thing designated by this word.

Let us take, for example, the word electricity.  If we understand by this term the common law which embraces a certain category of phenomena, it expresses a clear and useful idea; but as for its existence, it is not permitted to believe a priori that there is a distinct agent called electricity which is the efficient cause of the phenomena.  We ought never, says the old rule of philosophy, to admit entities without an absolute necessity.  The march of science has always consisted in gradually eliminating these provisory conceptions and in reducing the number of causes.  This fact is visible without going back to the ages of ignorance, when every new phenomenon brought with it the conception of a special being which caused it and directed it.  In later ages they had spirits in which there was everything:  volatile liquids, gases, and theoretical conceptions, such as phlogiston.  At the end of the last century, and at the beginning of our own, ideas being more rational, the notion of the “fluid” had been admitted, a mysterious and still vague enough category (but yet an already somewhat definite one)