In 1872 the price of steel was one hundred and eighty-six dollars per gross ton. It can be purchased now at varying prices less than thirty dollars per ton. The consumption of seventy millions of people is so great that it is difficult to imagine how so enormous a mass of almost imperishable material can be absorbed, and the latest figures show a consumption greatly in excess of those mentioned as the sum of manufactures. We turn again for the comparison without which all figures are valueless to the good year 1643, when the "General court" passed a resolve commending the great progress made in the manufacture of iron which they had licensed two years before, and granted the company still further privileges and immunities upon condition that it should furnish the people "with barre iron of all sorts for their use at not exceedynge twenty pounds per ton." We recall the first little piece of hollow ware made in America. We remember how old the old world is said to be and how long the tribes of men have plodded upon it, and then the picture appears of the progress that has grown almost under our eyes. The real Age of Steel began in 1865. It is not yet thirty years old. By comparison we are impressed with the fact that the real history of the metal is compressed into less than half an ordinary lifetime. THE STORY OF ELECTRICITY [Illustration: ERIPUIT CAELO FULMEN, SCEPTRUMQUE TYRANNIS.] There is a sense in which electricity may be said to be the youngest of the sciences. Its modern development has been startling. Its phenomena appear on every hand. It is almost literally true that the lighting has become the servant of man. But it is also the oldest among modern sciences. Its manifestations have been studied for centuries. So old is its story that it has some of the interest of a mediaeval romance; a romance that is true. Steam is gross, material, understandable, noisy. Its action is entirely comprehensible. The explosives, gunpowder, begriming the nations in all the wars since 1350, nitroglycerine, oxygen and hydrogen in all the forms of their combination, seem to be gross and material, the natural, though ferocious, servants of mankind. But electricity floats ethereal, apart, a subtle essence, shining in the changing splendors of the aurora yet existent in the very paper upon which one writes; mysteriously everywhere; silent, unseen, odorless, untouchable, a power capable of exemplifying the highest majesty of universal nature, or of lighting the faint glow of the fragile insect that flies in the twilight of a summer night. Obedient as it has now been made by the ingenuity of modern man, docile as it may seem, obeying known laws that were discovered, not made, it yet remains shadowy, mysterious, impalpable, intangible, dangerous. It is its own avenger of the daring ingenuity that has controlled it. Touch it, and you die.