accept them as facts, which soon become so commonplace and so fused into the common life as to be only noticed by their omission. To appreciate them let us briefly contrast the conditions of to-day with those of a hundred years ago. This is no easy task, for the comparison not only involves the experiences of two generations, but it is like the juxtaposition of a star with the noonday sun, whose superior brilliancy obliterates the lesser light. But reverse the wheels of progress, and let us make a quick run of one hundred years into the past, and what are our experiences? Before we get to our destination we find the wheels themselves beginning to thump and jolt, and the passage becomes more difficult, more uncomfortable, and so much slower. We are no longer gliding along in a luxurious palace car behind a magnificent locomotive, traveling on steel rails, at sixty miles an hour, but we find ourselves nearing the beginning of the Nineteenth Century in a rickety, rumbling, dusty stage-coach. Pause! and consider the change for a moment in some of its broader aspects. First, let us examine the present more closely, for the average busy man, never looking behind him for comparisons, does not fully appreciate or estimate at its real value the age in which he lives. There are to-day (statistics of 1898), 445,064 miles of railway tracks in the world. This would build seventeen different railway tracks, of two rails each, around the entire world, or would girdle mother earth with thirty-four belts of steel. If extended in straight lines, it would build a track of two rails to the moon, and more than a hundred thousand miles beyond it. The United States has nearly half of the entire mileage of the world, and gets along with 36,746 locomotives, nearly as many passenger coaches, and more than a million and a quarter of freight cars, which latter, if coupled together, would make nearly three continuous trains reaching across the American continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. The movement of passenger trains is equivalent to dispatching thirty-seven trains per day around the world, and the freight train movement is in like manner equal to dispatching fifty-three trains a day around the world. Add to this the railway business controlled by other countries, and one gets some idea of how far the stage-coach has been left behind. To-day we eat supper in one city, and breakfast in another so many hundreds of miles east or west as to be compelled to set our watches to the new meridian of longitude in order to keep our engagement. But railroads and steam-cars constitute only one of the stirring elements of modern civilization. As we make the backward run of one hundred years we have passed by many milestones of progress. Let us see if we can count some of them as they disappear behind us. We quickly lose the telephone, phonograph and graphophone. We no longer see the cable-cars or electric railways. The electric lights have gone out.