contains an iron or steel tube full of a kind of gunpowder invented by Holgate himself.  That gunpowder, in appearance like any other common stuff of that name, has, however, an explosive power two hundred times stronger than common gunpowder; the “Ticker” containing thus a powder which equals in force two hundred pounds of the common gunpowder.  At one end of the machine is fastened an invisible clock-work meant to regulate the time of the explosion, which time may be fixed from one minute to thirty-six hours.  The spark is produced by means of a steel needle which gives a spark at the touch-hole, and communicates thereby the fire to the whole machine.

The “Eight Day Machine” is considered the most powerful, but at the same time the most complicated, of all those invented.  One must be familiar with handling it before a full success can be secured.  It is owing to this difficulty that the terrible fate intended for London Bridge and its neighborhood was turned aside by the instantaneous killing instead of the two Fenian criminals.  The size and appearance of that machine changes, Proteus-like, according to the necessity of smuggling it in, in one or another way, unperceived by the victims.  It may be concealed in bread, in a basket of oranges, in a liquid, and so on.  The Commission of Experts is said to have declared that its explosive power is such as to reduce to atoms instantly the largest edifice in the world.

The “Little Exterminator” is an innocent-looking plain utensil having the shape of a modest jug.  It contains neither dynamite nor powder, but secretes, nevertheless, a deadly gas, and has a hardly perceptible clock-work attached to its edge, the needle of which points to the time when that gas will effect its escape.  In a shut-up room this new “vril” of lethal kind will smother to death, nearly instantaneously, every living being within a distance of a hundred feet radius of the murderous jug.  With these three “latest novelties” in the high season of Christian civilization, the catalog of the dynamiters is closed; all the rest belongs to the old “fashion” of the past years.  It consists of hats, porte cigars, bottles of ordinary kind, and even ladies’ smelling bottles, filled with dynamite, nitro-glycerin, etc., etc.—­weapons, some of which, following unconsciously Karmic law, killed many of the dynamiters in the last Chicago revolution.  Add to this the forthcoming long-promised Keeley’s vibratory force, capable of reducing in a few seconds a dead bullock to a heap of ashes, and then ask yourself if the Inferno of Dante as a locality can ever rival earth in the production of more hellish engines of destruction?

Thus, if purely material implements are capable of blowing up, from a few corners, the greatest cities of the globe, provided the murderous weapons are guided by expert hands—­what terrible dangers might not arise from magical occult secrets being revealed, and allowed to fall into the possession of ill-meaning persons!  A thousand times more dangerous and lethal are these, because neither the criminal hand, nor the immaterial invisible weapon used, can ever be detected.