I think it easy to explain the electricity of thunder storm clouds, in fact every cloud, or every part of a cloud, may be considered as a leading conductor, such clouds as have for the most part perpendicular height.  After being induced the change results by supposing the conduction of electricity either from the upper or from the lower side, according to greater or smaller speed of the air in the height.  In the first case the clouds will be charged positive, in the other negative.  I am inclined, therefore, to state that the electricity of thunder storm clouds must be considered as a special but disturbed case of the normal electric state of the atmosphere, and that all attempts to explain thunder storm electricity must be based on the study of the normal electric state of the atmosphere.

* * * * *

LINNAEUS.[1]

   [Footnote 1:  For the illustrations and many facts in the life of
   Linnaeus we are indebted to the Illustrated Tidning, Stockholm.]

BY C.S.  HALLBERG.

At intervals in the history of science, long periods of comparative inertia have attended the death of its more distinguished workers.  As time progresses and the number of workers increases, there is a corresponding increase in the number of men whose labors merit distinction in the literature of every language; but as these accessions necessitate in most cases further division of the honors, many names conspicuously identified with modern science fail of their just relative rank, and fade into unmerited obscurity.  Thus the earlier workers in science, like Scheele, Liebig, Humboldt, and others of that and later periods, have won imperishable fame, to which we all delight to pay homage, while others of more recent times, whose contributions have perhaps been equally valuable for their respective periods, are given stinted recognition of their services, if indeed their names are not quite forgotten.  Nothing illustrates so clearly the steps in the evolution of science as a review of the relative status of its representatives.  As in the political history of the world an epoch like that of the French revolution stands out like a mountain peak, so in the history of science an epoch occurs rather by evolution than revolution, when a hitherto chaotic, heterogeneous mass of knowledge is rapidly given shape and systematized.  Previous to the seventeenth century an immense mass of facts had accumulated through the labors of investigators working under the Baconian philosophy, but these facts had been thrown together in a confused, unsystematic manner.  A man of master mind was then needed to grasp the wonders of nature and formulate the existing knowledge of them into a scientific system with a natural basis.  Such a system was given by Linnaeus, and so great were its merits that it continues the foundation of all existing systems of classification.