to worship fire
still lingers within us and though we have better creeds than that
of Zoroaster and truer spiritual ideals than the Parsees we can
have no more appealing symbol of the purely spiritual than flame.
Phlogiston might well be another word for soul and we are unkind
to the old philosophers to take them too literally. The alchemists
were dreamers rather than doers after all, and though it is the
fashion to laud the doers it is often the dreamers that see most
clearly. As the flame leapt upward from the burning wood they saw
in it a rare, pure, ethereal substance which they called
Phlogiston.

Nor did they yield their theory when Lavoisier claimed to disprove
it by burning phosphorus in oxygen and weighing the result, which
was heavier than the phosphorus had been. Thereupon the world
derided the alchemists and lauded Lavoisier whose experiments laid
the foundation for the intricate science of modern chemistry. For
all that, science gives us the truth only from one angle and the
science of one age is often disproved by the science of the next.
Modern chemists may agree on what happens when phosphorus burns,
but many a theory of Lavoisier's day has been disproved in its
turn. A thousand scientists have declared flying impossible to
man, yet today men fly. Lavoisier was right, no doubt. Combustion
is the combination of an element with oxygen. He proved that with
his chemist's balance. Yet how did he prove that some imponderable
element does not leap from wood in flame? As well say that when a
man dies the spirit has not left the body because he weighs the
same. Watching the falling embers of the Yule log leap into flames
before they turn gray, I am apt to think that the intuition of the
alchemists touched a truth that the chemical apparatus missed. You
cannot measure its reaction on the mind of man or weigh the
results, but they are there.

*****

Wood was the sole fuel of the New England pioneers for two
centuries. In fact in many a remote farmhouse it is today, and the
fathers soon found by use which kind lighted quickest and which
burned longest and with the most steady heat, facts which the
subtle analysis of the chemists only confirmed. The conifers light
most readily and burn rapidly with the greatest heat in a given
time. The hard woods burn longest, some of them retaining fire for
a surprising length of time under just the right conditions. The
woodsmen will tell you that the pines light easily an