1864.] BRITISH ASSOCIATION. 155 



The President, after stating the subjects of greatest interest to 

 be discussed in this section, remarked : " In ihe commencement 

 of this address,! spoke of the comparatively few means we possessed 

 in 1838 of reaching rapidly this flourishing town; and now I 

 need not remind you that we are surrounded by a network of 

 railroads, which wind along valleys, or are driven under your hills. 

 Still less at our former meeting here had the genius and saga- 

 ciousness of Wheatstone overspread the country with the electric 

 telegraph, enabling men rapidly to transact important affairs in 

 our largest cities, whether separated by a few miles or by hun- 

 dreds of miles from their correspondents. At the last Manchester 

 meeting, indeed, we interchanged questions and answers with the 

 philosophers of St Petersburgh during an evening assembly ; and 

 since then great advances have been made in transmitting tele- 

 grams round the world. In this way a vast stride will be made 

 in the ensuing winter by the extension of the telegraph from Con- 

 stantinople through Asia Minor; and thence, via the Persian 

 Gulf, to the country of Mekran, at the head of the Indian Ocean, 

 and so to the British possessions in India. At the same time, 

 other efforts are in progress to carry a system of telegraphs from 

 Russia through Siberia, and thence across the Desert of Gobi to 

 Pekin. The great desideratum, however, of connecting Europe 

 with America by a submarine telegraph remains to be accom- 

 plished. With a view to that desirable end, the Council of the 

 Royal Geographical Society warmly supported a proposal by Dr. 

 Wallich to effect a complete survey of the sea bottom, as a pre- 

 cursor to the actual laying down of a cable upon the vast unknown 

 irregularities of the submarine surface. We naturally supported 

 an effort like this, which was certain to throw much light on 

 Natural History and Physical Geography ; and we rejoiced in the 

 preliminary researches which had been made towards the estab- 

 lishment of an electric line overland to British India ; because 

 they, for the first time, laid open to European knowledge countries 

 which, though unknown to the moderns, were seats of power when 

 Alexander the Great and his lieutenants invaded India. The 

 soundings which ascertain the nature of the bottom of the ocean, 

 not only give us the outlines and characters of various sunken 

 rocks, sands, and mud-banks, and of vast and deep cavities, but 

 inform us where the under-currents prevail, and where at vast 

 depths the surface is tranquil and unruffled in some places, whilst 



