GAS. (B.C.G.A., 30 Grosvenor Gardens, S.W. 1.) All who anyway
help towards smoke abatement are on the side of the angels, and we therefore salute the informing book issued by the British Commercial Gas Association as a piece of beneficent propaganda. The gas business has, of course, grown prodigiously since 1807, when the German, Winsor, was permitted to fix two or three demonstration lamps in Pall Mall, or since Murdock discovered the first " burner " by trying to stop a gas escape with his wife's thimble that happened to have a hole in it. But we hope there may be as great an expansion still ahead of us unless electricity can promise, or rather achieve, still greater things. The incandescent lamp no doubt gives out 60 candle-power per foot consumed as claimed, but we cannot agree that its light is either pleasant or " restful." Not until someone has evolved a gas lamp emitting the soft yellow radiance that one associates with oil, and a gas fire that looks at home and unashamed elsewhere than in a dentist's waiting-room, will we willingly inhabit an " All Gas House." The " All Gas Kitchen " is quite another story, and, if the cost of boiler- heating could be reduced, would soon be found in every civilized urban house.
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