lisions
are nearly impossible. Coal-oil is now much used in locomotives, and
almost universally on ocean steamers. The supposed dangers of its
conveyance and employment have been readily met by suitable precautions.

The cable-telephone has been perfected; one can converse directly with a
friend or business correspondent in Liverpool, London, or Paris, at the
rate of twelve cents a minute. How these things promote terseness and
pithiness of speech! I believe no one, unless it be the stockholders of
one or two old lines, regrets that all telegraphic and telephonic
communication in this country has been taken under the control of the
government. Underground laying of telegraph wires is now nearly
universal.

Photographing in colors, a French invention, is one of the newer and
more attractive arts. Printing one's own books has become almost too
easy, by using the type-writer, with sheets of celluloid, warmed to
300 deg., instead of paper. The celluloid hardens at once sufficiently
for stereotyping; so that any number of thousands of copies can be taken
from such off-hand plates. Truly, "of making many books there is no
end." Pencils, moreover, whose marks are permanent, have so improved as
to render that intolerably nasty fluid, ink, unnecessary, and confined
in its use entirely to a few old-fashioned people.

_Magnifying sound_ has gone far beyond the microphone and megaphone of
the last century. Deaf persons are now helped by instrumental aid almost
as much as defective sight is by proper glasses.

Gunpowder and nitro-glycerin have both been utilized for the production
of continuous motion, especially in the propulsion of the contents of
transportation tubes. By these agencies, all the local letter
distribution of Boston and Portland, and a good deal of that of New
York, is effected by tube-transmission to and from the various branch
deposit-offices of the cities.

Locomotives are at present running, at a speed limited by law, on our
best common roads. Several wealthy gentlemen in Philadelphia use small
private steam-carriages to go daily between their homes and places of
business. The _pocket magneto-electric lamp_ is one of the neatest of
modern inventions; and _wiring power_ one of the most tremendous. It is
said that the energy of a twenty-horse-power steam engine may be
conveyed from place to place as far as 25 or 30 miles, by suitable cable
under ground. The only difficulty is to make its management safe, as t