transport, which has done the like for travelling men. All these gifts
of science are aids in the process of levelling up; of removing the
ignorant and baneful prejudices of nation against nation, province
against province, and class against class; of assuring that social
order which is the foundation of progress, which has redeemed Europe
from barbarism, and against which one is glad to think that those who,
in our time, are employing themselves in fanning the embers of ancient
wrong, in setting class against class, and in trying to tear asunder
the existing bonds of unity, are undertaking a futile struggle. The
telephone is only second in practical importance to the electric
telegraph. Invented, as it were, only the other day, it has already
taken its place as an appliance of daily life. Sixty years ago, the
extraction of metals from their solutions, by the electric current,
was simply a highly interesting scientific fact. At the present day,
the galvano-plastic art is a great industry; and, in combination with
photography, promises to be of endless service in the arts. Electric
lighting is another great gift of science to civilisation, the
practical effects of which have not yet been fully developed, largely
on account of its cost. But those whose memories go back to the
tinder-box period, and recollect the cost of the first lucifer
matches, will not despair of the results of the application of science
and ingenuity to the cheap production of anything for which there is a
large demand.

The influence of the progress of electrical knowledge and invention
upon that of investigation in other fields of science is highly
remarkable. The combination of electrical with mechanical contrivances
has produced instruments by which, not only may extremely small
intervals of time be exactly measured, but the varying rapidity of
movements, which take place in such intervals and appear to the