“A series of gutta percha bands, about six inches wide and a quarter of an inch thick, are coiled on wheels on drums arranged for the purpose. These bands are studded down both sides with a single row of holes at short intervals apart. When a message is to be sent the clerks wind off these bands, inserting in the holes small brass pins, which, according to their combinations in twos or threes (with blank holes between), represent certain words or letters. In this manner the message is, as it were, “set up” in the bands with great rapidity, and if the number of bands employed is sufficiently large--say as numerous as the compositors employed in a large printing-office--messages equal in length to five or six columns of this journal could be set up and ready for transmission in the course of a single hour. Of course this operation in no respect interferes with the telegraph wire itself, which continues free for use until the bands of messages are actually being despatched. The gutta percha bands when full are removed to the instrument-room, a most simple appliance preventing any derangement or falling out of the pins while being moved about. In the instrument-room the bands are connected with ordinary steam machinery, by which they are drawn in regular order with the utmost rapidity between the charged poles of an electrical machine in such a manner that, during the moment of each pin’s passing, it forms electrical communication between the instrument and the telegraph, and a signal is transmitted to the other end of the wire, where the spark perforates a paper and records the message. The only limit to the rapidity of the operation is the rate at which the bands can be drawn, since the electrical contact of each pin, even for the 200th part of a second, is more than sufficient to transmit a word or signal from London and register it in America. Of course, as the message is recorded (we will say in America) with the same rapidity as that with which it is transmitted from London, a number of reading clerks will be requisite in order to translate it, by dividing it into small portions, with almost as much facility as it has been sent.” ROADS. Illustration: (‡ TRAIN BRIDGE OVER ROAD.) Roads, which were formerly of the utmost importance as the only means of communication between distant places, and on which an enormous amount of labour and capital have been expended, are now becoming rapidly subordinate to railways; however this may be, it is quite clear that roads can never be superseded by the latter. The numerous streets of great towns are so many short roads, and on some of them the amount of traffic is so very great, that the utmost skill of the engineer is required to resist the consequent wear and tear.