There is something in the catalogue of mechanical devices which almost affects the mind with fatigue. Fifty years ago the ordinary citizen picked up his ideas of all that was going on in the world from a sorely-taxed news-sheet; and a very blurred idea he managed to get at the best. Poor folk had to do without the luxury of the news, and they were as much circumscribed mentally as though they had been cattle; we remember a village where even in 1852 the common people did not know who the Duke of Wellington was. No such thing as a newspaper had been seen there within the memory of man; only one or two of the natives had seen a railway engine, and nobody in the whole village row had been known to visit a town. But now-a-days the villager has his high-class news-sheet; and he is very much discontented indeed if he does not see the latest intelligence from America, India, Australia, China--everywhere. An American statesman's conversation of Monday afternoon is reported accurately in the London journals on Tuesday morning; a speech of Mr. Gladstone's delivered at midnight on one day is summarized in New York and San Francisco the next day; the result of a race run at Epsom is known in Bombay within forty minutes. We use no paradox when we say that every man in the civilized world now lives next door to everybody else; oceans are merely convenient pathways, howling deserts are merely handy places for planting telegraph poles and for swinging wires along which thoughts travel between country and country with the velocity of lightning. We see that the world with its swarming populations is growing more and more like some great organism whereof the nerve-centres are subtly, delicately connected by sensitive nerve-tissues. Even now, using a lady's thimble, two pieces of metal, and a little acid, we can speak to a friend across the Atlantic gulf, and before ten years are over, a gentleman in London will doubtless be able to sit in his office and hear the actual tones of some speaker in New York. So much has the magic half century brought about.