3 KEPORT — 1876. 



Evans, and the Liverpool Compass Committee, by giving iu return a fresh marine 

 survey of terrestrial mafjnetism, to supply the navigator with data for correcting 

 his compass without sights of sun or stars. 



Can 1 go on to Precession and Nutation without a word of what I saw in the 

 Great Exhibition of Philadelphia ? In the U.S. Government part of it, Professor 

 Hilgard showed me the measuring-rods of the U.S. Coast Survey, with their beau- 

 tiful mechanical appliances for end measiu-ement, by whicli the three great base- 

 lines of Maine, Long Island, and Georgia were measured with about the same 

 accuracy as the most accurate scientific measurers, whether of Europe or America, 

 have attained in comparing two metre or yard measm'es. 



In the United-States telegraphic department I saw and heard Elisha Gray's 

 splendidly worked-out Electric Telephone actually sounding four messages simul- 

 taneously on the Morse code, and clearly capable of doing yet four times as many 

 with very moderate improvements of detail ; and I saw Edison's Automatic Tele- 

 graph delivering 1015 words in 57 seconds — this done by the long-neglected 

 electro-chemical method of Bain, long ago condemned in England to the helot 

 work of recording from a relay, and then turned adrift as needlessly delicate for 



that. In the Canadian Department I heard " To be or not to be there's the 



rub,'' through an electric telegraph wire ; but, scorning monosyllables, the electric 

 articulation rose to higher flights, and gave me passages taken at random from the 

 New- York newspapers : — " S.S. ' Cox ' has arrived " (I failed to make out the S.S. 

 ' Cox ') ; " the City of New York :" " Senator Morton ;" " The Senate has resolved to 

 print a thousand extra copies ;"' " The Americans in London have resolved to 

 celebrate the coming fourth of July." All this my own ears heard, spoken to me 

 with unmistakable distinctness by the thin circular disk armature of just such 

 another little electromagnet as this which I hold in ray hand. The words were 

 shouted with a clear and loud voice by my colleague-judge. Professor Watson, at 

 the far end of the telegraph-wire, holding his moiith close to a stretched membrane, 

 such as you see before you here, carrying a little piece of soft iron, which was tlius 

 made to'perform in the neighbourhood of an electromagnet in circuit with the line 

 motions proportional to the sonorific motions of the air. This, the greatest by far 

 of all the marvels of the electric telegTaph, is due to a young countryman of our own, 

 Mr. Graham Bell, of Edinburgh and Montreal and Boston, now becoming a 

 natmalized citizen of the United States. Who can but admire the hardihood of 

 invention which devised such very slight means to realize the mathematical con- 

 ception that, if electricity is to convey all the delicacies of quality which di- 

 stinguish articulate speech, the strength of its current must vary continuous!}' and 

 as nearly as may be in simple proportion to the velocity of a particle of air engaged 

 in constituting the soimd ? 



The Patent Museum of Washington (an institution of which the nation is justly 

 proud) and the beneficent working of the LTuited-States patent laws deserve notice 

 in the Section of the British Association concerned with branches of science to 

 which nine tenths of all the useful patents of the world owe their foundations. 

 I was much struck Avith the prevalence of patented inventions in the Exhibition : 

 it seemed to me that every good thing deserving a patent was patented. I asked 

 one inventor of a very good invention, " Why don't you patent it in England? " 

 He answered, " The conditions in England are too onerous." We certainly are far 

 behind America's wisdom in this respect. If Europe does not amend its patent 

 laws (England in the opposite direction to that proposed in the Bills before the 

 last two sessions of Parliament) America will speedily become the nursery of 

 useful inventions for the world. 



I should tell you also of " Old Prob's " weather-waniings, which cost the nation 

 250,000 dollars a year: money well spent say the western fanners; and not they 

 alone ; in this the whole people of the United States are agreed ; and though Demo- 

 crats or Eepnblicans playing the " economical ticket " ma}' for half a session stop 

 the appropriations for even the United-States Coast Survej', no one would for a 

 moment think of proposing to starve " Old Prob ; " and now that 80 per cent, of his 

 probabilities have proved true, and General Myers has for a month back ceased to 

 call his daily forecasts " probabilities " and has begun to call thenl indications, what 

 will the western farmers call him this time next year ? 



