would be developed as a business by better trained agents. We are thus fairly beaten on our own commercial preserves.

Our educational methods have begun at the wrong end. We ought to teach the masters first and then the men. Moreover we have to teach the teachers and those who have control of the pursestrings. The County Councils of England are scarcely qualified as yet to discharge the very serious duty of properly dealing with a question so few of them understand-though many of them have tackled the matter manfully, especially the London County Council, through its Technical Education Board on which a large proportion of co-opted experts have seats, who, by supporting existing institutions, have contributed towards the supply of teachers. But how are we to approach the masters? A fault once discovered is halfway to repair. It is difficult to remove the scales from the eyes of the man who has been successful in business and who knows not of his blindness; but the coming generation will be more enlightened, and the future masters better educated.

We are suffering from a lack of competent teachers. A teacher who has had no training in the practical world is worse than useless, for he imparts ideas derived from his inner consciousness or from the false teaching of his own abstract professor, which lead to mischief. In my own experience I have met with very serious inconveniences from this cause. The ideal professor of pure abstract science is a very charming personage, but he is a very arrogant and dogmatic individual, and, being a sort of little monarch in his own laboratory and lecture-room, surrounded by devoted subjects, his word is law, and he regards the world at large, especially the practical world, as outside his domain and beneath his notice. He is generally behind the age. These are not the men for technical institutes. Such teachers should possess the diploma of this Institution.

ENERGY.

The great generalization of modern days is the principle of the conservation of energy. Energy, like matter, can neither be created nor destroyed. Its form only can be changed. It is in its various transformations that it expends or absorbs work, and thus the engineer has to consider not only the various forms of matter, but the various forms of energy. He has to expend energy on matter in such a way as to supply the wants, improve the comforts, and add to the resources of mankind. He has not

only to utilize the waste energies of Nature, but he has to economize those that are in use so as to be able to apply them in the cheapest and most effective way. Every branch of engineering is thus dominated by the application of the great principle of work, which means the expenditure of energy, for energy is simply the capacity or property which Nature possesses for doing work. The engineer must be an educated man, educated not necessarily so much in the languages, arts, and history of the past, as in the changes and properties of ever-present matter, and the forms and behaviour of never-failing energy-changes and transformations directed by his will, controlled by his knowledge, and applied by his hands. Tredgold's great definition wants modification. It should read, "the profession of an engineer is to apply the great principle of work to the use and convenience of man," and his title should be rather that of Energeer than Engineer.

ELECTRICITY.

Day by day we are startled with some new development of electricity. We have learned the truth of the aphorism that that which is sure to occur is the unexpected. It is not of arms and of man that I propose now to sing, but of energy in its most romantic form.

A happy accident in early life placed me at the feet of our electrical Gamaliel, Michael Faraday. My boat was launched on the waters of knowledge that flowed from the rocks of Nature, opened by the strokes of the magic rod of that great master. The tide was taken at the flood, and, having rolled on for nearly fifty years, it has led me to this chair.

I learned from Faraday to regard electricity as the result of the play of the atoms and molecules of matter, that it was a mere form of motion, and that its influence through space was due to the existence and operations of a medium-since called the Ether. Maxwell crystallised Faraday's views into mathematical language, and deduced the magnificent generalization that light and electrical waves are of the same kind, moving through the Ether with the same velocity, and differing from each other only in degree. Hertz proved the existence of these waves and measured their lengths, and Marconi has now applied them to the practical purposes of telegraphy. I have carefully watched every new electrical fact wrung from Nature's storehouse without ever failing to find a simple mechanical explanation of their cause.

The term "Electricity" has even been defined by Act of Parlia

ment (45 Vic. cap. 56, 1882) as that form of energy which we make and sell. It can be measured with the minutest engineering exactness, and its effects are explicable on the simple dynamical and mechanical principles that underlie our profession.

LIGHTNING.

The first practical application of the science of electricity was for the protection of life and property. Franklin in 1752 showed how to secure ourselves and our buildings from the disastrous effects of a lightning stroke. Very little has been done since to improve upon his plan. A Lightning-Rod Conference, upon which I served, met in 1878, and its report, published in 1881, remains an admirable and useful standard of reference. The principle advocated by Franklin was prevention rather than protection. If a building or a ship be fitted and maintained with good continuous copper conductors, making a firm electrical contact with the earth or the sea, and be surmounted well up in the air with one or a cluster of fine points, all the conditions that determine a charge of atmospheric electricity and a flash of lightning are dissipated silently away and no terrible discharge is possible. A mischievous and baseless delusion is prevalent. that protectors actually attract lightning and may be sources of danger. Every exposed building should be fitted, but a wellprotected dwelling-house is the exception, not the rule. Even when protectors are fixed apathy leads to their imperfect maintenance. Their failure to act is always traceable to the neglect of some simple rule. Carelessness is the direst disease we suffer from. Telegraph and telephone wires which spread all over our towns and country are very much exposed to the influence of atmospheric electrical effects. Every instrument is now protected. Every telegraph pole has a lightning conductor. Accidents are rare, and the system itself is a public safeguard. countries like California and South Africa thunder-storms are very frequent and very severe, but their effects have been tamed.

In some

The engineer has answered Job's conundrum: "Canst thou send lightnings, that they may go, and say unto thee, Here we are?" in the affirmative. I sat, on the 12th June last, in a cable hut on the Welsh coast, near Nevin, with a telephone to my ear and heard flashes of lightning in Ireland, Scotland, England and Wales on the same afternoon. The sound emitted by a telephone receiver when a discharge takes place in the neighbourhood of a telephone circuit is distinctive and characteristic. It is a

signal as clear and as comprehensible as the words, "Are you there," or, "Here you are."

Franklin's work has been beneficent. He showed successfully how to bring the lightning down from heaven and how to dissipate its causes harmlessly away in the earth.

TELEGRAPHY.

In 1837 Cooke and Wheatstone showed how electricity could be practically used to facilitate intercommunication of ideas between town and town and between country and country. The first line was constructed in July of that year upon the incline connecting Camden Town and Euston Grove Station, the resident engineer being Sir Charles Fox, father of the senior Vice-President. Five copper wires were embedded in wood of a truncated pyramidal section and buried in the ground. The instrument used possessed five needles or indicators to form the alphabet. A portion of this original line was recently recovered in situ. I call it the "fossil telegraph," and used this sample to complete five circuits between the General Post Office and the offices of the various Cable Companies on the Queen's Diamond Jubilee Day, for the transmission of Her Majesty's simple message, "From my heart I thank my beloved people. May God bless them!" to all our princes, governors, captains, and rulers scattered over the whole globe. To north, south, east, and west, over every quarter and every continent, under every ocean and every sea, these words flew with the speed of thought. When Her Majesty returned to Buckingham Palace acknowledgments and replies had arrived from every colony, the first to come being from Ottawa, Canada, 16 minutes after the message was despatched.

The pioneer line of 1837, 13 mile long, has, during this period of sixty years, grown into a gigantic world-embracing system. Every man at his breakfast-table can read an account of every stirring event that has transpired on the previous day in every quarter of the world. Distance is annihilated and time overcome.

The extent of the present system of British telegraphs is shown by the following Table ::

The mechanical construction of the telegraphs of this country was designed by our late distinguished Member Edwin Clark and his brother, Latimer Clark, also a Member. Their affairs were originally directed by our Past-Presidents, Robert Stephenson, Bidder, and Locke. We in this country have always been in advance of other countries in telegraphic progress, and this was greatly due to the inventive genius of Cromwell Varley, a Member of the Institution. These are men under whom I served and learnt, and whose engineering traditions I have done my best to maintain and to better. Progress has never been checked. The speed of signalling and the capacity of working have been increased sixfold, and wires can now be worked faster than messages can be handled by the clerical staff.

The form of submarine cable and the nature of the materials used in its construction have varied but very little since the first cable was laid in 1851. The recent invasion of our channels and seas by the Limnoria terebrans, a mischievous little crustacean which bores through the gutta percha insulating covering, and exposes the copper conductor to the sea-water, leading to its certain destruction, has led to the use of a serving of brass tape as a defence. It has proved most effective.

No one has done more than Lord Kelvin (Honorary Member) to improve the working of submarine cables. His recording apparatus is almost universally employed on long cables. By the duplex method of transmission the capacity of cables has been practically doubled, and this has been still further improved by applying to cables the system of automatic working, which is such a distinguishing feature of our Post-Office system. The number of electrical impulses which can be sent through any cable per minute is dependent upon its form, and is subject to simple and exact laws, but it varies with the quality and purity of the materials used. There is no difficulty in maintaining the purity of copper. Indeed copper is frequently supplied purer than the standard of purity adopted in this country-known as Matthiessen's standard. The purity of gutta percha is, however questionable. The supply of this dielectric has dwindled; it has failed to meet the demand; its cultivation has been neglected. The result is a dearth of the commodity, a great increase in price, and its adulteration by spurious gums. India-rubber, its sole competitor for cables, is being absorbed for waterproof garments and pneumatic tyres, but for underground purposes paper is being used to an enormous extent. Paper has the merit, when kept dry, not only of being an admirable insulator, but of being very durable. There is