y; to Messrs. Woodhouse and Rawson, electrical
engineers; to Mr. Woolf, the lead-pencil manufacturer; and to Mr.
Gardiner, for numerous specimens with which the lectures were
illustrated.

THE STORY OF A TINDER-BOX

LECTURE I.

MY YOUNG FRIENDS,--Some months ago the Directors of this Institution
honoured me with a request that I should deliver a course of Christmas
Juvenile Lectures. I must admit I did my best to shirk the task, feeling
that the duty would be better intrusted to one who had fewer demands
upon his time. It was under the genial influence of a bright summer's
afternoon, when one thought Christmas-tide such a long way off that it
might never come, that I consented to undertake this course of lectures.
No sooner had I done so than I was pressed to name a subject. Now it is
a very difficult thing to choose a subject, and especially a subject for
a course of juvenile lectures; and I will take you thus much into my
confidence by telling you that I selected the subject upon which I am to
speak to you, long before I had a notion what I could make of it, or
indeed whether I could make anything at all of it. I mention these
details to ask you and our elders who honour us--you and me--with their
company at these lectures, for some little indulgence, if at times the
story I have to tell proves somewhat commonplace, something you may have
heard before, a tale oft told. My sole desire is that these lectures
should be true _juvenile_ lectures.

Well, you all know what this is? [_Holding up a box of matches._] It is
a box of matches. And you know, moreover, what it is used for, and how
to use it. I will take out one of the matches, rub it on the box, and
"strike a light." You say that experiment is commonplace enough. Be it
so. At any rate, I want you to recollect that phrase--"strike a light."
It will occur again in our course of lectures. But, you must know, there
was a time when people wanted fire, but had no matches wherewith to
procure it. How did they obtain fire? The necessity for, and therefore
the art of producing, fire is, I should suppose, as old as the world
itself. Although it may be true that our very earliest ancestors relied
for necessary food chiefly on an uncooked vegetable diet, nevertheless
it is certain that very early in the history of the world people
discovered that cooked meat (the venison that our souls love) was a
thing not altogether to be despised. Certainly by the time of Tub