The telegraph completes the mastery over space in the conveyance of thought that the railway attains in that of persons and property.  Its facilities here are commensurable with its duty of placing thousands of all countries in instantaneous communication with their homes.  Those from over-sea will find that, instead of dragging “at each remove a lengthening chain,” they are, on the exposition grounds, in point of intercourse nearer home than they were when half a day out from the port of embarkation, and ten days nearer than when they approached our shores after a sail of three thousand miles.  To get out of call from the wire it is necessary to go to sea—­and stay there.  Another hundred years, and even the seafarer will fail of seclusion.  Floating telegraph-offices will buoy the cable.  Latitude 40 deg. will “call” the Equator, and warn Grand Banks that “Sargasso is passing by.”  Not only will the march of Morse be under the mountain-wave, but his home will be on the deep.

[Illustration:  BRITISH BUILDINGS.]

The submarine and terrestrial progress of the telegraph was in ’67 and ’73 already an old story.  At the Centennial it presents itself in a new role—­that of interpreter of the weather and general storm-detector.  This application of its powers is due to American science.  Indeed, the requisites for experiments were not elsewhere at command.  A vast expanse of unbroken territory comprising many climates and belts of latitude and longitude, and penetrated throughout by the wire under one and the same control, did not offer itself to European investigators.  These singular advantages have been well employed by the United States Signal Service within the past five years.  Its efforts were materially aided by the antecedent researches of such men as Espy and Maury, the latter of whom led European savants into the recognition of correct theories of both air- and ocean-currents.  Daily observations at a hundred stations scattered over the continent, exactly synchronized by telegraph, yielded deductions that steadily grew more and more consistent and reliable, until at length those particularly fickle instruments, the weather-vane, the thermometer, the barometer and the magnetic fluid, have formed, in combination, almost an “arm of precision.”  The predictions put forth in the “small hours” each morning by the central office in Washington assume only the modest title of “Probabilities.”  Some additional expenditure, with a doubling of the number of stations, would within a few years make that heading more of a misnomer.  Meanwhile, the saving of life and property on sea and land already effected is a solid certainty and no mere “probability.”  At the station on the exposition grounds the weather of each day, storm or shine, in most of the cities of the Old and New Worlds will be bulletined.  “Storm in Vlaenderlandt” will be as surely announced to the Dutch stroller on Belmont Avenue as though he were within hearing of his cathedral bell.