saints sold on street corners by Italian peddlers. Yet it also makes candles, and of course it makes candles more than anything else.

It is now heated again and melted and carried in great ladles to the molding machines. These machines, of which a whole battery has to be installed in a large candle factory, are of about the proportions of an ordinary upright piano. The melted stearic acid is poured in at the top.

At the bottom of each machine there are spools on which the wicks are rolled. The end of each wick is carried up through a mold and held taut at the top. The melted stearic acid runs into all the molds in the machine and envelops the wick. Great ingenuity has been exercised in constructing the machine in such a way that it will hold each wick along exactly the center line of its mold.

The molds being filled, like the pipes of an organ, the stearic acid is allowed to settle. Being settled, the whole group of candles in each molding machine is raised bodily. Each candle leaves its mold and comes up drawing its wick behind it.

The machine now exhibits a whole set of molded candles sustaining a whole set of wicks running down through the molds to the spools at the bottom.. Another dose of stearic acid is immediately administered to the molds. The molds fill up and the stearic acid in them is formed into candles. Each machine now has two sets of candles, one on top and one in the molds. The two sets are still connected by the wicks.

A workman wielding a sharp knife now approaches and cuts the connection. He runs his knife briskly along between the two sets of candles. The wicks are severed and the top set is ready to be removed.

There is quite a difference here between present practice and the practice of the days when the wick was dipped, dipped, dipped into melted yellow tallow till finally the rough bulk of a candle was laboriously acquired.

The stearic acid candle comes out of its mold smooth, white, fast. Yet, after all, it remains, as previously remarked, a real tallow product. And the wonder is that it keeps coming out of its mold in an age and in a country in which so many

tric light plants. An electric engineer remarked the other day:

"We don't seem to reduce the consumption of kerosene in the towns we strike. We accustom the people to a lot of brightness and a lot of glare in the streets and in the shop-windows. Then

some of them put elec-
tricity into their homes,
those that can afford it.
But the others-who
think they can't afford
it simply go
go ahead
and buy more oil lamps
and use enough kero-
sene to float a ship. It
drives me to drink
when I look at it."

The candle maker happily has the same experience. He sells candles to the men in metal mines. They have become so accustomed to gas and electric lights on the streets and in the stores and perhaps even in the main shafts of their mines that when they go along the dark leyels where electric lights are not commonly used they insist upon enough candles to make up for the difference. They use their candles with a profusion that was unknown fifty years ago.

more brilliant methods of illumination

have been developed.

Three reasons for this marvel have already been remarked and a fourth was promised. It is a strange reason-and an obvious one. It is like the reason why when a trolley road is laid down parallel with a steam road both of them make money. People use the steam road just as much as ever and they use the trolley road, too. They have simply become accustomed to doing more traveling than before.

In the same way people become accustomed to using more light. The Standard Oil Company sells plenty of kerosene in towns, which have installed elec

As it is with the miner, so it is with the housekeeper. Even if she has her house stocked with electric bulbs she lights a candle to go down into the cellar or up into the attic and, in a kind of reaction from the glare of electricity, she frequently insists upon having shaded candles at the dinner table in order to secure a dim and cultivated effect.

In consequence of all of which things, nobody today ever thinks of practicing economy on a candle. In the novels of the early part of the last century people were always blowing out candles in order

OIL COOLING AND FILTERING ROOM.

to save an inch of tallow. Today we let our incidental candles burn away, unnoticed, in corners without that sharp regard to thrift which characterized our ancestors. Just because of the universal diffusion of more and better light in the world the user of candles is more generous, more reckless, than ever before.

We are making candles today out of every possible material. The Standard Oil Company, having attacked the candle with the kerosene lamp, turns around and manufactures candles on its own account out of paraffin, both paraffin and kerosene being products of petroleum. The Catholic churches still require enormous quantities of wax for the candles which

they use in their services, and there is many a factory which finds the wax candle an excellent basis for a high financial rating in the commercial directories. In New England they still make large numbers of candles out of the waxy product of the bayberry bush, sometimes called the tallowtree. And in the southwestern part of Europe, as well as in certain sections of North America, candles are even made out of a mineral, dug up from the earth like coal, a mineral called ozokerite, so thoroughly suitable for candles that it is frequently referred to as mineral tallow.

Yet in the midst of all these rivals the old "tallow dip" still keeps going. When it reaches what all the spectators agree should be the end of its race it simply makes a slight shift in its attire and decides to run another lap. It has trained itself down to the extent of being only a "stearic acid mold," but it is still in reality the same old runner and while it doesn't win any of the. races it still insists on finishing. It will be a long time before it is finally ruled off the track.

-RALPH HODGSON.

HE continued menace of the cotton boll weevil to the cotton interests of the country still continues, not with

standing the fact that the scientists of the United States Department of Agriculture have been for the past ten years carrying on exhaustive experiments with a view to checking the pest in its steady march northward. It is freely admitted that the loss to the South is at least 500,000 bales yearly on account of this greedy insect, Texas being the heaviest loser.

But it is not Texas alone that suffers from the ravages of the boll weevil, Lou

isiana, Florida, New Mexico, and other Southern states are fast becoming the feeding grounds of the little gray bug which has disturbed the general economic conditions of the South, and likewise caused disturbances in every quarter of the globe where American cotton is used in the factories. The people of Lancashire, England, are almost as familiar with the work of the pest as are the people of the United States. Foreign governments have become alarmed.

The Egyptian government some time since issued a formal proclamation prohibiting the importation of American cotton seed on account of the danger of introducing the boll weevil. As a matter of fact, there is considerable danger