not to be lectures upon general topics, but the outcome of such special
study and practical experience as members of the Institution had
exceptional opportunities of acquiring in the course of their
professional occupation. The subject to be dealt with during the present
session was that of electricity. Already telegraphy had been brought
forward by Mr. W. H. Preece, and telephonic communication by Sir
Frederick Bramwell.

Thus far electricity had been introduced as the swift and subtile agency
by which signals were produced either by mechanical means or by the
human voice, and flashed almost instantaneously to distances which were
limited, with regard to the former, by restrictions imposed by the
globe. To the speaker had been assigned the task of introducing to their
notice electric energy in a different aspect. Although still giving
evidence of swiftness and precision, the effects he should dwell upon
were no longer such as could be perceived only through the most delicate
instruments human ingenuity could contrive, but were capable of rivaling
the steam engine, compressed air, and the hydraulic accumulator in the
accomplishment of actual work.

In the early attempts at magneto electric machines, it was shown that,
so long as their effect depended upon the oxidation of zinc in a
battery, no commercially useful results could have been anticipated. The
thermo-battery, the discovery of Seebeck in 1822, was alluded to as a
means of converting heat into electric energy in the most direct manner;
but this conversion could not be an entire one, because the second law
of thermo-dynamics, which prevented the realization as mechanical force
of more than one seventh part of the heat energy produced in combustion
under the boiler, applied equally to the thermo-electric battery, in
which the heat, conducted from the hot points of juncture to the