In New York City, Arcade railways, with various ramifications, extend along the main arteries of travel, and give rapid transit to citizens and visitors alike. Double tracks in each direction insure absolute safety, while the express trains, stopping only at principal stations, have their separate way; the local trains, stopping at every block, taking the outer one of each pair of tracks. The motive power here employed is electricity, partly brought on from Niagara and other power-producing stations, and partly carried along the Jersey and Long Island coasts, where the waves are busy night and day, doing the work of New York and other cities. The vehicles upon the street are driven by electric power, and the same current which drives them affords light at night to occupant and passer-by. The plate-ways carry an electric current which may be taken off by those vehicles provided with necessary motors and connecting appliances; so that the horses have little traction to do; and in fact some private vehicles, never going off the streets supplied with plate-ways, have no horses at all. Other private vehicles are supplied with motors deriving their current from overhead wires, not through trollies as once done in electric railways, but by induction. Storage batteries that are light and compact have been invented and are already in use for driving carriages along roads which have neither plate-ways nor overhead conductors by which the current can be carried by induction to the motors within the vehicles. The motors for such private carriages are no larger than a man’s hat, and are turned out by the thousand just as Waterbury watches were made in 1893. In other divisions of the broad domain of science, than those referred to in detail, the past fifty years have been laurel-crowned. Astronomers have not been idle during the last sixty years or so. They have reached out into space, and discovered enough asteroids to account for the lost planet between Mars and Jupiter; and have supplied the missing link between Mercury and the sun. With the spectroscope they have found in the sun and various planets, several new metals, for which, by analogy they have searched on earth, and many of which they have found. The geologists, delving into the crust of the earth, have mapped out its entire surface, so that the location of every considerable quantity of gold, silver, iron, copper, tin, coal, oil, etc., is known and recorded, and useless prospecting done away with. The Arctic and Antarctic zones have been thoroughly worked, the open Polar Sea discovered and regularly traversed, and the mines of the Polar regions worked regularly and with profit for metals and minerals used every day in the world’s industrial pursuits. Scarcity of rain in any one place is promptly counteracted by each local government by consent of the others concerned; great fires being started to attract the clouds, which will bring in their arms the friendly drops.