Perhaps the most beautiful and intelligent of this wonderful family of "infants" was born eighteen years ago--the telephone. Even when it was the tiniest kind of an infant, and many men, some of them quite clever in other lines than prophesying, thought it would never be more than a puny little creature--a sort of scientific freak--the telephone was the most wonderful thing of the century. It did something absolutely new. It took your voice, made an electric current of it, and turned it out at the other end voice again, with all the little quivers and tones that each voice has of its own. The telephone, more than any other electrical invention, made people think that anything is possible with electricity. It was such a marvellous performance to send the voice along a wire from one end of a city to another, that when people became a little familiar with it they were prepared for anything. A famous electrician once raised a laugh at a dinner by relating in his speech that when a friend had asked him over the telephone if he recognized his voice, he replied, "Yes, and I can smell your cigar." But you would not be surprised if you learned to-morrow that you could see the man at the other end of the wire, or smell his cigar by electricity, or that a line of flying ships between New York and London was to start skimming next week. But it was some little time before people got familiar with the telephone. At first they did not believe in it, though now they will believe in anything called electrical. For some time there were few telephones in use, and the lines were very short. Then the exchange system was started, and telephony began to grow with leaps and bounds. In 1874 the telephone, as the saying goes, "was not born nor thought of" outside of the laboratory of Professor Bell. In 1894, there were 250,000 telephone subscribers in the United States. New York and Chicago each has 10,000. The number of conversations carried on each day by means of the telephone--well, you might almost as well try to count the grains of sand on the sea-shore. Not only has this infant learned to talk a great deal--and, surprising to say, it speaks all languages with equal ease, even the hopelessly difficult ones--but it has got amazing lung power. Its voice reaches in a moment farther than you can travel in a day. When young, it whispered a distance of a mile or two. At six or eight years of age it talked clearly with a couple of hundred miles between speaker and listener. For three years or more people in Boston and New York have talked with people in Chicago, and to-day they think nothing of that, and want to talk to San Francisco. [Illustration: INTERSCHOLASTIC SPORT]