generator or device for ringing a little bell as a signal that some one wishes to communicate. To such perfection have telephones been brought that it is quite possible to converse intelligibly at the distance of a thousand miles, with a less satisfactory service at twice or thrice that distance. The possibilities of clear speech-transmission at indefinite distance are without measure. Like the telegraph, the telephone has opened an immense and profitable industry, involving hundreds of millions of dollars. At the end of the century it is, unfortunately, monopolistic; but the time is near when a reasonable charge for service will enable every business house to communicate with its customers, and when even the remote corners of counties will be brought into touch with their capitals and with one another. Along the lines of civilizing contact the telephone fairly divides the wonders of the century with the telegraph, while for intimate intellectual communication it is a triumph of genius without parallel. It is the dispenser of speech in city, town, and village; in factory and mine, in army and navy; throughout government departments; and in Budapest, Hungary, it is a purveyor of general news, like the newspaper, for the “Telephone Gazette” of that city has a list of regular subscribers, to whom it transmits, at private houses, clubs, cafes, restaurants, and public buildings, its editorials, telegrams, local news, and advertisements. A very natural outgrowth of the telephone was that curious invention known as the phonograph (Gr. _phone_, sound, and _graphein_, to write). It is not only an instrument for writing or preserving sound, but for reproducing it. As a simple recorder of sound, it was an instrument dating as far back as 1807, when Dr. Young showed how a tuning-fork might be made to trace a record of its own vibrations. But Young’s thought had to go through more than half a century of slow evolution before the modern phonograph was reached; for in the phonautograph of Scott, the logographs of Barlow and Blake, and the various other attempts up to 1877 to make and preserve tracings of speech, there were no successful means of reproducing speech from those tracings hit upon. [Illustration: A GRAPHOPHONE.]