With the introduction of the new form of older energy, electricity, with the reduction of the lightning into thraldom, has now come a new impulse affecting all the industries. Through its mysterious, its still unknown action, steam now reaches out far from its own place, driving the electric car along miles of rail; giving light throughout all the country about it, turning night into day, and repressing crime while encouraging legitimate labor, reaching into distant chambers and every little workshop, to offer its powerful aid in all the distributed work of cities. Without the steam engine there would be little work available for electricity, but the appearance of this, the latest and most useful handmaid of steam, has given the engine work to do in an uncounted number of new fields, has called in the inventor once more to adapt steam to its new work. The "high-speed engine" is the latest form of the universal helper. And such has been the readiness and the intelligence of the contemporary inventor that we now have engines capable of turning their shafts three hundred rotations a minute and without a perceptible variation of velocity, whatever the change of load or the suddenness with which it is varied. In the days of Watt a fluctuation of five per cent. in speed was thought wonderfully small; in those of Corliss, the variation was restricted to two per cent. and we wondered at this unanticipated success. To-day, thanks to Porter and Allen, to Hartnell, to Hoadley, to Sims, to Thomson, to Sweet, to Ide, and to Ball, we have seen the speed fluctuation restricted to even less than one per cent. of its normal average. The inventors of the steam engine are, through their representatives of to-day, according to the statisticians, doing the equivalent of twelve times the work of a horse, for every man, woman and child on the globe. We have not less, probably, than a half million of miles of railway, transporting something over 150,000,000,000 of tons a mile a year. A horse is reckoned to haul a ton weight about six and a half miles, day by day, by the year together. In the United States, it is reckoned that the steam engine, on the railways alone, hauls a thousand tons one mile, for every inhabitant of the country, every year, or, if it is preferred to so state it, a ton a thousand miles. This is the way in which the East and the West are, by the inventors of the steam engine, enabled to help each other. This costs about $10 each individual; it would require some 25 millions of horses to do the work, and would cost about $1,000 a family, which is more than twice the average family earnings.