We have remarked upon such methods as those of the electric welder which summon intense heat without fire, and we have glanced at the electric lamps which shine just because combustion is impossible through their rigid exclusion of air. Then for a moment we paused to look at the plating baths which have developed themselves into a commanding rivalry with the blaze of the smelting furnace, with the flame which from time immemorial has filled the ladle of the founder and moulder. Thus methods that commenced in dismissing flame end boldly by dispossessing heat itself. But, it may be said, this usurping electricity usually finds its source, after all, in combustion under a steam-boiler. True, but mark the harnessing of Niagara, of the Lachine Rapids near Montreal, of a thousand streams elsewhere. In the near future motive power of Nature's giving is to be wasted less and less, and perforce will more and more exclude heat from the chain of transformations which issue in the locomotive's flight, in the whirl of factory and mill. Thus in some degree is allayed the fear, never well grounded, that when the coal fields of the globe are spent civilization must collapse. As the electrician hears this foreboding he recalls how much fuel is wasted in converting heat into electricity. He looks beyond either turbine or shaft turned by wind or tide, and, remembering that the metal dissolved in his battery yields at his will its full content of energy, either as heat or electricity, he asks, Why may not coal or forest tree, which are but other kinds of fuel, be made to do the same? One of the earliest uses of light was a means of communicating intelligence, and to this day the signal lamp and the red fire of the mariner are as useful as of old. But how much wider is the field of electricity as it creates the telegraph and the telephone! In the telegraph we have all that a pencil of light could be were it as long as an equatorial girdle and as flexible as a silken thread. In the telephone for nearly two thousand miles the pulsations of the speaker's voice are not only audible, but retain their characteristic tones. In the field of mechanics electricity is decidedly preferable to any other agent. Heat may be transformed into motive power by a suitable engine, but there its adaptability is at an end. An electric current drives not only a motor, but every machine and tool attached to the motor, the whole executing tasks of a delicacy and complication new to industrial art. On an electric railroad an identical current propels the train, directs it by telegraph, operates its signals, provides it with light and heat, while it stands ready to give constant verbal communication with any station on the line, if this be desired.