You are, of course, all aware that electrical railways have been run, and are running with success in several places. Their introduction has been chiefly due to the energy and invention of Messrs. Siemens. I do not doubt of their success and great extension in the future--but when considering the earliest examples of these railways in the spring of last year, it occurred to me that in simply adapting electric motors to the old form of railway and rolling stock, inventors had not gone far enough back. George Stephenson said that the railway and locomotive were two parts of one machine, and the inference seemed to follow that when electric motors were to be employed a new form of road and a new type of train would be desirable. When using steam, we can produce the power most economically in large engines, and we can control the power most effectually and most cheaply when so produced. A separate steam engine to each carriage, with its own stoker and driver, could not compete with the large locomotive and heavy train; but these imply a strong and costly road and permanent way. No mechanical method of distributing power, so as to pull trains along at a distance from a stationary engine, has been successful on our railways; but now that electricity has given us new and unrivaled means for the distribution of power, the problem requires reconsideration. With the help of an electric current as the transmitter of power, we can draw off, as it were, one, two, or three horse-power from a hundred different points of a conductor many miles long, with as much ease as we can obtain 100 or 200 horse-power at any one point. We can cut off the power from any single motor by the mere break of contact between two pieces of metal; we can restore the power by merely letting the two pieces of metal touch; we can make these changes by electro magnets with the rapidity of thought, and we can deal as we please with each of one hundred motors without sensibly affecting the others. These considerations led me to conclude, in the first place, that when using electricity we might with advantage subdivide the weight to be carried, distributing the load among many light vehicles following each other in an almost continuous stream, instead of concentrating the load in heavy trains widely spaced, as in our actual railways. The change in the distribution of the load would allow us to adopt a cheap, light form of load. The wide distribution of weight, entails many small trains in substitution for a single heavy train; these small trains could not be economically run if a separate driver were required for each. But, as I have already pointed out, electricity not only facilitates the distribution of power, but gives a ready means of controlling that power. Our light, continuous stream of trains can, therefore, be worked automatically, or managed independently of any guard or driver accompanying the train--in other words, I could arrange a self-acting