750 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Rudolph II to torment his mind with self-made horoscopes of evil 

 import, let us unscientifically imagine that the sun could suddenly 

 burst out with several hundred times its ordinary amount of heat 

 and light, thereby putting us into a proper condition for spectro- 

 scopic examination by curious astronomers in distant worlds. 



But no, it is far pleasanter to keep within the strict bounda- 

 ries of science, and not imagine anything of the kind. 



THE SUCCESSOR OF THE RAILWAY. 



Bv APPLETON MORGAN. 



WITHIN the few years remaining to the nineteenth century, 

 if not indeed already, will certainly pass away the human 

 being who can remember a date when there were no railways. A 

 railway then will be, if it is not already, as much part of a natu- 

 ral landscape as a mountain or a river, since no one can then re- 

 call a time at which railways as well as rivers did not run. 



Our nineteenth century has been the railway age. Within 

 its bounds the railway has been entirely conceived, invented, 

 utilized, and perfected. But will the century which has been the 

 birth and genesis of the railway witness also its exodus and its 

 death ? Perhaps not ; and yet perhaps. It has been anticipated 

 and foreseen that electricity was to be the successor of steam, and 

 experimental electric locomotives have already been operated 

 with more or less satisfactory results. But the question appears 

 at this moment to be, not whether the electric locomotive will 

 supersede the steam locomotive, but whether locomotives them- 

 selves are not to be dispensed with, and tossed, together with 

 drawings, models, plans, specifications, and estimates for a sub- 

 stitution of power, upon the scrap heap, while the substitution 

 shall be, not of the motive power, but of the motor. 



It looks, indeed, as if the next century, whatever it may have 

 in the way of aerial flight in store for us, will have no difficulty, 

 if it desires the honor, of being christened " the trolley age." 

 For it is to this new traction system that the railway companies 

 are already looking with that apprehension with which an heir- 

 less landed proprietor regards his hostile next of kin. Loaded 

 down with their vast burden of fixed charges and costly mainte- 

 nance, crippled by all sorts of parasites, legal, illegal, and mixed, 

 there seems to be nothing for them to do but to wait patiently to 

 be superseded. 



For many years the railway companies had come to philoso- 

 phize helplessly at the prospective diminution of suburban profits 

 from the horse or dummy-operated tramway, and had missed the 



