%92. State of the Arts, Sciences, and Industry.%--The appliances left on the list, because in some form they were known to the men of 1763, would now be thought crude and clumsy. There were printing presses in those days,--perhaps fifty in all the colonies. But they were small, were worked by hand, and were so slow that the most expert pressman using one of them could not have printed so much in three working days as a modern steam press can run off in five minutes. There was a general post, and Benjamin Franklin was deputy postmaster-general for the northern district of the colonies. But the letters were carried thirty miles a day by postriders on horseback, and there were never more than three mails a week between even the great towns. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday a postrider left New York city for Philadelphia. Every Monday and Thursday another left New York for Boston. Once each week a rider left for Albany on his way to Quebec. On the first Wednesday of each month a packet boat sailed from New York for Falmouth, England, with the mail, and this was the only mail between Great Britain and her American colonies. We put electricity to a thousand uses; but in 1763 it was a scientific toy. Franklin had just proved by his experiment with the kite that lightning and electricity were one and the same, and several other men were amusing themselves and their hearers by ringing bells, exploding powder, and making colored sparks. But it was put to no other use. If we take up a daily newspaper published in one of our great cities and read the column of wants, we find in them twenty occupations now giving a comfortable living to millions of men. Yet not one of these twenty existed in 1763. The district messenger, the telegraph operator, the typewriter, the stenographer, the bookkeeper, the canvasser, the salesman, the commercial traveler, the engineer, the car driver, the hackman, the conductor, the gripman, the brakeman, the electrician, the lineman, the elevator boy, and a host of others, follow trades and occupations which had no existence in the middle of the eighteenth century.