"In other days, along the street, A glimmering lantern led the feet, When on a midnight stroll; But now we catch, when night is nigh, A piece of lightning from the sky And stick it on a pole. "Time was when one must hold his ear Close to a whispering voice to hear, Like deaf men--nigh and nigher; But now from town to town he talks And puts his nose into a box And whispers through a wire." So jogs the old world along. We sometimes think it is slow, but when we look back a few years and see what has been accomplished it seems to have had a marvelously rapid development. Something like fifty years ago a professor of physics in one of our colleges was giving his class a course in electricity. The electric telegraph was too little known at that time to cut much of a figure in the classroom, so the stock experiments were those made with the frictional electric machine and the Leyden jar. One day the professor had, in one hour's time, taken his class through a course of electricity, and at the end he said: "Gentlemen, you were born too late to witness the development of this great science." I often wonder if the good professor is ever allowed to part the veil that separates us from the great beyond and to look down upon this busy world of ours in which electricity plays such an important part in our every-day life; and if so, what he thinks of that little speech he made to the boys fifty years or more ago. If we make an analysis of the history of the science of electricity we shall see that it has progressed in successive eras, shortening as they approach our time. For a period of 2300 years, from Thales to Franklin, but little or no progress was made beyond the further development of the phenomena of frictional electricity--the most important invention being that of the Leyden jar. From Franklin to Volta was forty-eight years, and from Volta to Faraday about thirty-two years. From this time on the development was very rapid as compared with the old days. Soon after Faraday, Morse, Henry, Wheatstone, and others began experiments that have grown, during fifty or sixty years, into a most colossal system of electric telegraphs, telephones, electric lights and electric railroads. In the latter days marvel has succeeded marvel with such rapid strides that the ink is scarcely dry from the description of one before another crowds itself upon our attention. Where it will all end no one knows, but that it has ended no one believes. The human mind has become so accustomed to these periodic revelations of the marvelous that it must have the stimulus once in a while or it suffers as the toper does when deprived of his cups. The commercial instinct of the news-vender is not slow to see the situation, and if the development is too slow to suit the public demand his fertile brain supplies the lack. So that every few days we hear of some great discovery made by some one it may be unknown to fame. It has served its purpose.