Among the most useful inventions of the latter half of the nineteenth century the gas-engine holds a prominent place. While its development has not been so brilliant or so startling as that which we can note in the employment of electricity, it holds, among the applications of heat, the most important place of any invention made within that period. Even amid the contrivances by which, in recent times, the other forces of nature have been subdued to the uses of man, there are only a few which rival the gas-engine in practical importance. With regard to the steam-engine itself, it is remarkable how little that is new has really been invented since the time of Watt and Woulfe. In the specifications of the former can be shown completely delineated, or fully foreshadowed, nearly every essential condition of the economy and efficiency attained in our own days; and it is only by a gradual "survival of the fittest" of the many contrivances which were made to carry out his broad ideas that the steam-engine of the present has attained its great economy. It is but within the last fifty years that the laws of the relation between the different physical forces were first enunciated by Justice Grove, and confirmed by the classical researches of Dr. Joule--the one a lawyer, working hard at his profession, the other a man of business engaged in manufacture. Both are still living among us; the latter having withdrawn from business, while the former is a Judge of the High Court of Justice. I always regret that the claims of his profession have weaned Justice Grove from science; for, while it may be possible to find in the ranks of the Bar many who might worthily occupy his place on the Bench, it would be hard to find among men of science any with as wide-reaching and practical philosophy as that which he owns. The chemist demonstrated long since that it was impossible for man to create or destroy a single particle of ponderable matter; but it remained for our own time to prove that it was equally impossible to create or destroy any of the energy which existed in nature as heat, mechanical power, electricity, or chemical affinity. All that it is in the power of man to do is to convert one of these forms into another. This, perhaps the greatest of all scientific discoveries since the time of Newton, was first, I believe, enunciated in 1842 by Grove, in a lecture given at the London Institution; and it was experimentally proved by the researches of Joule, described in a paper which he read at the meeting of the British Association which was held at Cork--my native city--in 1843. My friend Dr. Sullivan, now President of Queen's College, Cork, and I myself had the privilege of being two of a select audience of half a dozen people, who alone took sufficient interest in the subject to hear for the first time developed the experimental proof of the theory which welds into one coherent system the whole physical forces of the