Excerpt from The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 6: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics The elasticity of the air enables fishes to rise and sink in water, through the ao tion of the air-bladder. The sudden compression of air liber ates its latent heat, and produces fire. On this principle the pneumatic tinder box is constructed. Brockhaus says that air has as yet been compressed only into one-eighth of its orig inal bulk. For every degree of heat between the freezing - point and the boiling-point, 32 Degrees and the expansion of air is about ig-uth part, so that any invention which seeks to use rarefied air as a motive pow er must employ a very intense degree of heat, enough to fuse many kinds of met als. To the celebrated Mr. Boyle and to Henry Cavendish, both of Great Britain, we are indebted for most of what we know of this particular property of the air. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.