856 KEPOHT— 1887. 



steam plouglis, steam thrashing machines, reaping machines, and other agricultural 

 machinery ; we had also monster ironclads and rifled ordnance. 



As new departures since 1861 which have already established themselves we 

 have the telephone, the incandescent electric light, the dynamo, and the secondary 

 battery, the gas engine and sewing machine, not to mention the bicycle. We have 

 also the tin can and freezing machine and roller mills, as well as the machine gun 

 and Whitehead torpedo. 



One of these departui'es, the telephone, both from its usefulness and from the 

 scientific interests which surround it, as aifording, like the telescope, a means of 

 directly increasing the power and range of one of our senses, must for ever re- 

 main recognised as a step in mechanical science, for tlie introduction of which this 

 period will be distinguished. 



The sewing machine, too, though little calculated to attract notice, in its 

 influence on the welfare and appearance of all grades of society yields in import- 

 ance to few, if any, previous mechanical steps. While the process of preserving 

 food by means of the tin can and its more striking contemporary, the freezing 

 machine, direct results of the discoveries of Pasteur, have already opened up the 

 food-producing resources of the whole world for the supply of the few chosen 

 spots, and in doing so created a most welcome demand for further advance in the 

 application of steam. 



Great things have been and still are hoped from the electric departures which 

 have interested us so much during the last few years ; also of the gas engine, 

 which has most usefully occupied ground for which the steam engine is not well 

 adapted ; and as to the importance of machine guns and torpedoes many will think 

 the less the better. 



However high or low an estimate we may form of the probable future import- 

 ance of some of these inventions, and however much disappointment we may feel 

 at the non-success wliich has attended some of the boldest and apparently most 

 promising departures, such as the Crampton process for substituting a blast of coal- 

 dust for the ordinary furnace, or Sir Henry Bessemer's endeavours to prevent 

 distressing motion at sea, there is still no ground for discouragement. 



For whether or not this period be henceforth remarkable for what, to borrow 

 language from Section D, may be called the origination of new mechanical species, 

 is a small matter compared with the fact that it has undoubtedly been remarkable 

 for unprecedented achievements in the development of higher states of organisation 

 in those mechanical species which were already in existence. 



There has never been a time in which mechanical revolutions have followed 

 one another with such rapidity. In all the main departments of practical 

 mechanics progress has been so rapid that appliances have been superseded long 

 before reaching the term of their natural existence. There are some steamboats 

 like the steel mail-boats between Dover and Calais still on the same service as in 

 1861, but very few, and only such as were then much in advance of their time. The 

 Atlantic fleet of Royal Mail steamers has twice undergone complete revolution. 

 Not only have the paddle-boats which constituted the Cunard line in 1861, and 

 which included the ' Scotia,' then new, entirely disappeared off the line, but the 

 iron screw steamers which displaced them have given place to the steel boats with 

 compound engines — ' Servia,' ' Aurania,' ' Etruria,' and ' Umbria.' 



In railway appliances the iron road has given place to that of steel, iron tu-es 

 and locomotives to steel, the block system has become general, as have continuous 

 brakes ; while the carriages in which members have spent four and a quarter hours 

 on their way from London to this meeting, although mostly still of the English 

 plan, are very different in size and ease from those in which" five and a half hours 

 were spent in 1861. 



In the works and mills the change is not less complete. It is, indeed, the 

 change here that has not only rendered possible, but forced on the revolution in our 

 means of communication. The gi-eat step in the production of steel was already 

 taken in 1861, and great results were then anticipated ; there were, however, 

 doubts and difficulties, and it was not for some years that sufticient mastery was 

 obtained over the detail of the manufacture and use of the new material to bring 



