valuable ingredients, but their unstable nature prevents their use under modern conditions.
Meyer also describes the use of salts to tint an alcohol flame, which is merely an elaboration of Ruggieri's palm tree and of little interest at the present time.
The next name prominent in pyrotechny is that of F. M. Chertier, who published in 1854 his "Nouvelles recherches sur les feux d'artifice," after having published a pamphlet on the subject about twenty-five years previously.
In this work Chertier devotes most of his attention to the subject of colour, and although new ingredients have been introduced which were either unknown or were not then available on account of expense or other causes, since the time of his writing, yet there can be no doubt that Chertier stands alone in the literature of pyrotechny and as a pioneer of the modern development of the art.
Tessier, in the introduction to his "Treatise on Coloured Fires," published in 1859, whilst paying tribute to Chertier's work, regrets that he only possessed "quite superficial notions of chemistry." Here speaks the chemist. The writer recently asked a pyrotechnic chemist of many years' experience, whose knowledge of pyrotechnic chemistry is probably second to none, his opinion of Tessier's book, and received this answer. "Tessier's book contains too much chemical theory and too little pyrotechnic practice." There speaks the pyrotechnist.
The writer, as he has before remarked, has no wish to belittle the value of the chemist's work in relation to pyrotechny, but a knowledge of chemistry is not the most important attribute of the successful pyrotechnist.
As in other arts so in pyrotechny, experience and natural aptitude are the first essentials.
Chertier may have had little knowledge of chemistry, but
