Berthing the monstrous ships of the future is a problem met by a radical and world-wide alteration in the dimensions of docks, supplemented by quays running out into deep water, which in London would extend on both sides of the Thames, on the north from Tilbury to the Albert Docks, thus converting the old river, like the Clyde, into a long water-street lined by sea-walls, and kept constantly dredged, and connected with London by special lines of railway. But what is to be the propelling power of the future leviathans? Not steam; but electricity, applied to the machinery from storage batteries. Why not? ELECTRIC STORAGE AS A MOTIVE POWER Sceptics in the past argued that it was manifestly impossible that vehicles would ever be horseless, or that communications would one day be transmitted by telegraph, not to speak of the time when even the wires for that purpose would be dispensed with; while the suggestion that artificial light would be obtained through any other agency than candles or oil-lamps, and that sail-less ships would be propelled against wind and tide, seemed savouring of Bedlam! Yet all these seeming impossibilities, and many more, have become realities. So, too, will electrical marine propulsion, and, although we live in a more enlightened era than our ancestors, few persons even now perhaps realise that ships will be navigated without either sail or steam power. By this time, however, the public have become so familiarised with scientific marvels, that they have ceased to wonder at anything. For instance, there is nothing really more marvellous than that hundreds, or even thousands, of horse-power should be borne by a copper wire, or a moderate cable, and despatched to a distant point with the speed of lightning for traction purposes; but, without knowing what the nature of the force is, we cease to be astonished at it. In point of fact, it is not more occult than heat or light, the attraction of gravity or cohesion. Therefore when it was announced last year that Edison had solved the problem of how to store electrical force effectually, everybody took it for granted that he had been, or would eventually be, as successful in this direction as in multiplying electric light and applying it to a thousand new purposes. The “Wizard of Llewellyn Park” is necessarily a sanguine inventor, but he has taken the right and only satisfactory way to determine the question--that of varied and long-continued experiment. Electricity differs from all other forms of power in two respects--it can be stored, and transmitted to a distance. The task of transmission has been, and is being, rapidly achieved. The far greater object of light and efficient storage, the most momentous problem awaiting solution in the whole range of practical physics, may very shortly be solved.