A SLIGHT TEST OF THE IMAGINATION.
We live in a world in which certain conditions of the atmosphere and the so-called elements surrounding our daily existence, are entirely familiar to us. From force of habit we are likely to forget that had Nature, for instance, been planned under a different range of livable temperatures, all the familiar objects of our daily existence would have existed under entirely different form.
For instance, if the normal temperature had been about 2700 degrees Fahrenheit instead of about 60 degrees Fahrenheit, and we had been constructed so that we could comfortably endure that degree of temperature, we could have gone sailing on a sea of molten iron, in boats built of plumbago crucibles, and oars made of silica brick. Under these delightful conditions we could place frozen lumps of our sea of iron in our ice boxes for refrigeration. Flat irons and stove lids would therefore have been the product of the ice man. The water with which we are now familiar, of course, could not exist in its liquid form, or even as steam, but instead as a highly gaseous state, which we would probably have been called upon to breathe. Certain other substances with which we are perfectly familiar in our daily life, such as the common stick sulphur, for instance, would exist in an entirely different physical state, although their chemical properties would be entirely unchanged, and we would be given to understand that an "allotropic" transformation had taken place.
If we can now imagine ourselves as existing under the relative conditions described above, which are undoubtedly the "natural" conditions of some other world, it will then be easy for us to understand quite clearly some of the other "allotropic" forms of iron and steel than those with which we are at present familiar.