I HAVE read with much interest the note of Mr. T. J. Baker, on a surface-tension experiment (NATURE, No. 1600, June 28, 1900). The author describes, with photographic illustrations, a phenomenon at first observed by Savart (1833), and later studied by Hagen, Tyndall, J. Plateau, Boussinesq and myself, but in all these studies, as in Mr. Baker's note, no other force than surface tension is supposed to produce the different phases of the phenomenon. Therefore I resumed the subject two years ago1 and endeavoured to explain the consecutive phases by proving that in this experiment there arises always some elasticity of traction, not only in both superficial layers, but even in the whole mass of the sheet.