The Spirit of the Last Days

Man was created upright but he hath sought out many inventions:

AN IMPORTANT INVENTION.-A Mr. Phillipps of London has lately invented a "Fire annihilator for instantaneously extinguishing fires by aerated vapor." The principles, says a foreign Journal, are chemical, and they proceed on facts deduced from considerations of the source of all power-chemical action. Fire, in the ordinary acceptation of the term, is a phenomenon which results from the union of oxygen, the supporter of combustion, hydrogen, the element of flame, and carbon, the element of light. If the oxygen be withdrawn, the fire ceases. This the fire annihilator accomplishes. A jet of a peculiar gaseous vapor, which possesses a greater affinity for the oxygen of the air than the oxygen has for the hydrogen and the carbon with which it is combined, is instantaneously generated by the machine, and thrown with extraordinary rapidity on the fire, which being instantaneously deprived of the "supporter of combustion" at once ceases. The extinction is so sudden that in case of a strong fire, which Mr. Phillips "put out" on board a vessel in the Thames, the operation did not occupy "one second," and it was compared by the spectators, to a flash of lightning.

TIMES AND SEASONS.

CITY OF NAUVOO,

FEB. 15, 1846