or reasons
I shall explain to you directly. Having made the tinder, they shut it
down in the box with the lid (Fig. 3 A) to prevent contact with air. You
see I have the tinder now safely secured in my tinder-box. Here is a
piece of common flint, and here is the steel. Here too are the matches,
and I am fortunate in having some of the old matches made many years
ago, prepared as you see with a little sulphur upon their tips. Well,
having got all these etceteras, box, tinder, flint and steel, we set to
work in this way:--Taking the steel in one hand, and the flint in the
other, I must give the steel a blow, or rather a succession of blows
with the flint (Fig. 3 B). Notice what beautiful sparks I obtain! I want
one of these sparks, if I can persuade it to do so, to fall on my
tinder. There! it has done so, and my tinder has caught fire. I blow my
fired tinder a little to make it burn better, and now I apply a sulphur
match to the red-hot tinder. See, I have succeeded in getting my match
in flame. I will now set light to one of these old-fashioned candles--a
rushlight--with which our ancestors were satisfied before the days of
gas and electric lighting. This was their light, and this was the way
they lighted it. No wonder (perhaps you say) that they went to bed
early.

I should like to draw your attention to one other form of tinder-box,
because I do not suppose you have ever seen these kind of things before.
I have here two specimens of the pistol form of tinder-box (Fig. 5).
Here is the flint, the tinder being contained in this little box. It is
the same sort of tinder as we made just now. The tinder was fired with
flint and steel in the same way as the old-fashioned flint pistols fired
the gunpowder. And you see this pistol tinder-box is so constructed as
to serve as a candlestick as well as a tinder-box. I have fired, as you
perceive, my charred linen with this curious tinder-box, and thus I get
my sulphur match alight once more!

[Illustration: Fig. 5.]

It was in the year 1669 that Brandt, an alchemist and a merchant--a very
distinguished scientific man--discovered the remarkable substance I have
here, which we call phosphorus. Brandt was an alchemist. I do not know
whether you know what an alchemist is. An alchemist was an old-fashioned
chemist. These alchemists had three prominent ideas before them. The
first thing they sought for was to discover a something--a powder they
thought it ought to be--that would cha