THE ELECTRIC TELEGRAPH. 



his hand a pencil or pen, the point of which should be in any 

 other town or city, no matter how distant, and should, with such 

 pen or pencil, write or delineate in such distant place, such 

 characters or designs as might please him, with as much prompti- 

 tude and precision as if the paper to which these characters or 

 designs were committed lay upon the table before him ; or that 

 an individual pulling a string at London should ring a bell at 

 Vienna, or holding a match at St. Petersburgh should discharge a 

 cannon at Naples ! 



6. Suppose he should affirm that means would be discovered for 

 converting charcoal into diamonds ; that the light of the sun 

 would be compelled, without the intervention of the human hand, 

 to make a portrait or a picture, with a fidelity, truth and precision, 

 with which the productions of the most exalted artistic skill 

 would not bear comparison ; and that this picture should be pro- 

 duced and completed in its most minute details in a few seconds 

 nay, evenii^the fraction of a second; that candles and lamps would 

 be superseded by flame manufactured on a large scale in the suburbs 

 of cities, and distributed for use in pipes, carried under the streets, 

 and into the houses and other buildings to be illuminated ; and 

 that the precious and other metals being dissolved in liquids, 

 would form themselves into the articles of ornament and use by 

 a spontaneous process, and without the intervention of human 

 labour!! 



No authority however exalted, no attainments however pro- 

 found, no reputation however respected, could have saved the 

 individual rash enough to have given utterance to such predictioas 

 some forty years ago, from being regarded as labouring under 

 intellectual derangement. Yet all these things have not onlv 

 come to pass, but the contemplation of many of them has become 

 so interwoven with our habits, that familiarity has blunted the 

 edge of wonder. 



7. Compared with all such realities, the illusions of oriental 

 romance grow pale ; fact stands higher than fiction in the scale of 

 the marvellous ; the feats of Aladdin are tame and dull ; and the 

 slaves of the lamp yield precedence to the spirits which preside 

 over the battery and the boiler. 



8. Of all the physical agents discovered by modern scientific 

 research, the most fertile in its subserviency to the arts of life is 

 incontestably electricity, and of all the applications of this subtle 

 agent, that which is transcendently the most admirable in its 

 effects, the most astonishing in its results, and the most important 

 in its influence upon the social relations of mankind, and upon the 

 spread of civilisation and the diffusion of knowledge, is the 

 Electric Telegraph. No force of habit, however long continued, 



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