Like Edison he has taken out about a hundred different patents, some of which are connected with oil motors and smokeless gunpowder. His flying-machine, as described in his paper at the British Association in 1894, burns oil fuel, which developed three hundred and sixty horse-power. It was driven at sixty miles an hour horizontally, and the machine contained an aeroplane sloping six degrees to the horizon. The weight to be lifted was eight thousand pounds. After running nine hundred feet, the machine exerted an upward thrust of two thousand pounds greater than its own weight. The machine, after one thousand feet, broke loose; the steam was shut off, and it fell. The experiments have been conducted at Bexley, in Kent, where Mr Maxim had a light track of railway laid down, sixteen hundred feet long, on which the machine moved. The back part of the machine having been liberated from the check-rail too soon caused the accident at the experiment, and sent the whole machine off the track. There is sufficient evidence that it did rise from the ground, and Lords Rayleigh and Kelvin have become believers in its possibilities. This machine, as described at the time, with its four side sails and aeroplanes set, is over one hundred feet wide, and looks like a huge white bird with four wings instead of two. It is propelled by two large two-bladed screws, resembling the screw-propellers of a ship, driven by two powerful compound engines. IRONCLADS. A modern ironclad is an enormous piece of complicated mechanism. In order to protect this mechanism from hostile shot, the greater part of it is placed under water and covered by a thick steel deck; the remainder above water being protected by vast armour-plates varying from eight to twenty-four inches in thickness. From the exterior, an ironclad is by no means a thing of beauty; one writer has described it as 'a cross between a cooking apparatus and a railway station;' but in place of this ingenious parallel, imagine a low flat-looking mass on the water; from the centre rises a huge funnel, on either side of which are a turret and a superstructure running to the bow and stern; two short pole masts, with platforms on the top for machine guns, complete an object calculated to bring tears to the eyes of the veteran sailor who remembers the days of the grand old line-of-battle ship, with its tall tapering masts and white sails glistening in the sun. A stranger going on board one of our newest types of ironclads would lose himself amid the intricacies and apparent confusion of the numerous engines, passages, and compartments; it is a long time, in fact, before even the sailors find their way about these new ships; and the Admiralty allow a new ironclad to remain three months in harbour on first commissioning before going to sea, in order that the men may become acquainted with the uses of the several fittings on board, each ironclad that is built now being in many ways an improvement on its predecessor.