Valuable money prizes will be competed for by aeronauts at the coming World’s Fair at St. Louis in 1903. Sir Hiram Maxim has expressed an intention of spending £20,000 in further experiments and prizes. In this country, too, certain journals have offered large rewards to any aeronaut who shall make prescribed journeys in a given time. It has also been suggested that aeronautical research should be endowed by the state, since England has nothing to fear more than the flying machine and the submarine boat, each of which tends to rob her of the advantages of being an island by exposing her to unexpected and unseen attacks. Tennyson, in a fine passage in “Locksley Hall,” turns a poetical eye towards the future. This is what he sees-- “For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see, Saw the vision of the world and all the wonder that would be, Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sail, Pilots of the purple twilight dropping down with costly bales, Heard the heavens fill with shouting, then there rained a ghostly dew, From the nations’ airy navies, grappling in the central blue.” Expressed in more prosaic language, the flying-machine will primarily be used for military purposes. A country cannot spread a metal umbrella over itself to protect its towns from explosives dropped from the clouds. Mail services will be revolutionised. The pleasure aerodrome will take the place of the yacht and motor-car, affording grand opportunities for the mountaineer and explorer (if the latter could find anything new to explore). Then there will also be a direct route to the North Pole over the top of those terrible icefields that have cost civilisation so many gallant lives. And possibly the ease of transit will bring the nations closer together, and produce good-fellowship and concord among them. It is pleasanter to regard the flying-machine of the future as a bringer of peace than as a novel means of spreading death and destruction. TYPE-SETTING BY MACHINERY.