At the last meeting of the British Association, the chairman, sir R. H. Inglis, thus adverted to the progress of the electric telegraph, from a report presented to the Legislative Council and Assembly of New Brunswick, relative to a project for constructing a railway, and with it a line of electro-magnetic telegraph, from Halifax to Quebec:-- “The system is daily extending. It was, however, in the United States of America that it was first adopted on a great scale, by professor Morse, in 1844; and it is there that it is now already developed most extensively. Lines for above thirteen hundred miles are in action, and connect those states with Her Majesty’s Canadian provinces; and it is in a course of development so rapid that, in the words of the report of Mr. Wilkinson to my distinguished friend, his excellency sir W. E. Colebrook, the governor of New Brunswick, ‘no schedule of telegraphic lines can now be relied upon for a month in succession, as hundreds of miles may be added in that space of time. So easy an attainment does such a result appear to be, and so lively is the interest felt in its accomplishment, that it is scarcely doubtful that the whole of the populous parts of the United States will, within two or three years, be covered with a net-work, like a spider’s web, suspending its principal threads upon important points, along the sea-board of the Atlantic on one side, and upon similar points along the lake frontier on the other.’ I am indebted to the same report for another fact, which I think the association will regard with equal interest:--‘The confidence in the efficiency of telegraphic communication has now become so established, that the most important commercial transactions daily transpire, by its means, between correspondents several hundred miles apart. Ocular evidence of this was afforded me by a communication a few minutes old between a merchant in Toronto, and his correspondent in New York, distant about six hundred and thirty-two miles.’ I am anxious to call your attention to the advantages which other classes also may experience from this mode of communication, as I find it in the same report:--‘When the Hibernia steamer arrived in Boston, in January, 1847, with the news of the scarcity in Great Britain, Ireland, and other parts of Europe, and with heavy orders for agricultural produce, the farmers in the interior of the states of New York, informed of the state of things by the magnetic telegraph, were thronging the streets of Albany with innumerable team-loads of grain, almost as quickly after the arrival of the steamer at Boston, as the news of that arrival could ordinarily have reached them. I may add that, irrespectively of all its advantages to the general community, the system appears to give already a fair return of interest to the individuals or companies who have invested their capital in its application.’”