Natural Gas the Fuel of the Future.—­The house of the near future will have no fireplace, steam pipes, chimneys, or flues.  Wood, coal oil, and other forms of fuel are about to disappear altogether in places having factories.  Gas has become so cheap that already it is supplanting fuels.  A single jet fairly heats a small room in cold weather.  It is a well known fact that gas throws off no smoke, soot, or dirt.  In a brazier filled with chunks of colored glass, and several jets placed beneath, the glass soon became heated sufficiently to thoroughly warm a room 10x30 feet in size.  This design does away with the necessity for chimneys, since there is no smoke; the ventilation may be had at the window.  The heat may be raised or lowered by simply regulating the flow of gas.  The colored glass gives all the appearance of fire; there are black pieces to represent coal, red chunks for flames, yellowish white glass for white heat, blue glass for blue flames, and hues for all the remaining colors of spectrum.  Invention already is displacing the present fuels for furnaces and cooking ranges and glass, doing away with delay and such disagreeable objects as ashes, kindling wood, etc.  It has only been within the past few years that natural gas has been utilized to any extent, in either Pennsylvania, New York or Ohio.  Yet its existence has been known since the early part of the century.  As far back as 1821, gas was struck in Fredonia, Chautauqua county, N.Y., and was used to illuminate the village inn when Lafayette passed through the place some three years later.  Not a single oil well of the many that have been sunk in Pennsylvania has been entirely devoid of gas, but even this frequent contact with what now seems destined to be the fuel of the future bore no fruit of any importance until within the past few years.  It had been used in comparatively small quantities previous to the fall of 1884, but it was not until that time that the fuel gave any indication of the important role it was afterward to fill.  At first ignored, then experimented with, natural gas has been finally so widely adopted that to-day, in the single city of Pittsburgh, it displaces daily 10,000 tons of coal, and has resulted in building cities in Ohio and the removal thereto of the glass making industries of the United States.  The change from the solid to the gaseous fuel has been made so rapidly, and has effected such marked results in both the processes of manufacture and the product, that it is no exaggeration to say that the eyes of the entire industrial world are turned with envious admiration upon the cities and neighborhoods blessed with so unique and valuable a fuel.  The regions in which natural gas is found are for the most part coincident with the formations producing petroleum.  This, however, is not always the case; and it is worthy of notice that some districts which were but indifferent oil-producers are now famous in gas records.  The gas driller, therefore, usually