Press telegrams have enormously increased in number and length since the purchase of the telegraph system by the State. When the companies owned the wires, the news service from London to the provinces was ordinarily not more than a column of print a night. At the present time the news service of the Press Association alone over the Post-office wires to papers outside the metropolis averages fully 500 columns nightly. Since 1870 this Association has paid the Post-office £750,000 for telegraphic charges, and in addition to this, very large sums have been paid by the London and provincial daily papers for the independent transmission of news, and by the principal journals in the country for the exclusive use, during certain hours, of 'special wires.' Some of the leading papers in the provinces receive ten or more columns of specially telegraphed news on nights when important matters are under discussion in Parliament; and from this some idea may be formed of the amount of business now transacted between the Press and the Telegraph Department. THE TELEPHONE. So much have times altered in the last fifty years, that the electric telegraph itself, which now reaches its thin arms into more than six thousand offices, is threatened in its turn with serious rivalry at the hands of a youthful but vigorous competitor, the telephone. Its advantages are such that its ultimate popularity cannot be a matter of doubt. It is no small benefit to be able to recognise voices, to transact business with promptitude by word of mouth, to get a reply, 'Yes' or 'No,' on the spot, instead of having to rush to the nearest telegraph office. Great inventions are often conceived a long time before they are realised in practice. Sometimes the original idea occurs to the man who subsequently works it out; and sometimes it comes as a happy thought to one who is either in advance of his age, or who is prevented by adverse circumstances from following it up, and who yet lives to see the day when some more fortunate individual gives it a material shape, and so achieves the fame which was denied to him. Such is the case of M. Charles Bourselle, who in 1854 proposed a form of speaking-telephone, which, although not practicable in its first crude condition, might have led its originator to a more successful instrument if he had pursued the subject further.